Urgency
nothing could be more important
A poem about urgency, sirens, and the many shores in sight. Odysseus heard the sirens and asked to be tied to the mast — not to avoid beauty, but to keep his course. The shores were real. The song was real. But they weren't his. See the notes below the poem.
Urgency
This morning I heard,
urgency sing,
from outside,
my round window,
its soft seductive song,
of shores that seem so near,
and almost mine,
like the insistent sirens,
Odysseus heard,
that carries you away,
on restless waves,
that curl and crumple,
the fluency of ocean,
in unrelenting arrivals,
on wrecked shores of sand.
In stillness,
I ask patience,
to keep me tied up,
so I instead can hear,
the urgency,
from within —
nothing could be more important.
Notes
I woke one morning with a feeling I couldn’t quite name. Not anxiety. Something more directional, more alive. It felt like urgency — but not in the form I’d come to learn in adult life.
Most of us have learned to hear urgency as noise: breaking news, deadlines, all-caps messages, demands. But that morning it seemed older than all that. More like a call.
The poem came from trying to distinguish between two urgencies: the one that pulls you outward toward every visible shore, and the quieter one that asks you to remain with what is yours.
Restlessness, I think, is often what happens when we cannot tell the difference between the two. Restlessness is unanswered urgency from within. And patience is not passivity. It is a way of listening to the deeper calls. Inner urgency is beautiful. It’s saying: this matters. Not out there. In here.
Odysseus heard the sirens and asked to be tied to the mast — not to avoid beauty, but to keep his course. The song was real. The shore was real. But neither belonged to his course.