Unlike most fields of inquiry, poetry does not seek to provide answers. But that to me is its gift. Jane Hirshfield opens one of her poems with this question:

The world asks, as it asks daily:  
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?

By the end of the poem, she gets an answer. But not really:

The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend

don’t despair of this falling world, not yet 

didn’t it give you the asking

In the end, the gift is the asking itself. I’m reminded of a poem by Rumi (trans.Coleman Barks) about a man who prays to God continually but then one day stops because he never gets an answer. The man is told in a dream that the praying by itself was enough of an answer:

The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.

Hirshfield’s cry is what binds her to the world. In her experience, it is the world that asks, “What can you do,” using her mouth, her language. Even as the world is deep-broken and fractured, here there is union. One voice. One need and desire.

And will it be satisfied? The question “what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?” has no answer, not because it’s a rhetorical question, not because the answer is nothing along with despair, but because no answer will ever be adequate. We will never be satisfied as long as there is suffering and division. And to know that, to insist on our ongoing connection, is the gift. If we hear, again and again, the world’s sorrow and its plea, if we avoid rushing off on the trail of some inadequate answer and instead sit with the question, we get to feel all the longing and grief that fuels it. There is a wholeness in that, a binding across the divide.

We are each other’s 
business; 
we are each other’s 
harvest; 
we are each other’s 
magnitude and bond.

Hirshfield ends her personal missives with these lines by Gwendolyn Brooks, weaving us together. How can I help is the natural, heart-opening-rending question, one that poets strive to keep alive and unanswered.