The word selah (Hebrew: ) — “to pause, reflect, and feel meaning” — appears almost seventy times in the poetry of the Psalms. Grief by its nature is poetical, elegiac. And poetry, like grief, is subversive, unbridled, and disobedient. Poetry violates linguistic norms because it must. Poetry helps us feel. And when we allow ourselves to feel that

Poetry and the arts—like the right kind of prayer—can help us to stay with grief long enough to feel its sweetness, long enough for the sweetness and grief to deepen our sensitivity to the exquisite agony and ecstasy that we call appreciation, praise, love … and life. We will find or write and recite the poems and prayers that resonate most deeply

say? I was once reading an interview with James Baldwin, and he described a frustration he had with Langston Hughes. He said when Hughes told you about a lynching, it was too realistic. That Hughes sounded like his daddy. Baldwin preferred Countee Cullen. He wanted the art, the suggestiveness, the distance to make it possible to digest horror.