Poems hold us. They hold our grief, our love. They hold spaces for us to find our way through all we have lost, all we will lose. They hold the pieces—of lives torn, of ourselves shattered. They hold our hurt alongside our hope, if not the whole, whatever may be gathered as a whole. And poems hold the dead, as our dreams often do, if only momentarily. Do poems hold death itself? Perhaps so, or at least what it's like. Each poem in this exhibit holds something so clear and horrible, we must ask along with Ai, "[c]ould anyone alive survive it?" While poems can hold such things, we also hold poems, or behold them. They are often before our eyes—in our hands sometimes, on a screen, or, say, on a gallery wall. If we look closely, we might see in them "the beauty / Of our own eyes." Look at the poems looking back at you. Look at them looking beyond you. Behold and be held.
