Poetry Xtras » "The Spirit Is Near" by Amy King

On any given day, I find myself imagining the lives of strangers, often to figure out what sets us apart from each other. On the day I wrote, "The Spirit is Near," I had earlier walked down a Baltimore street and conjured roles for the few people I passed. For reasons since forgotten, I also considered what role history has in creating a person, or in predetermining one, and so, I questioned the relevance of history lessons on the scene before me. I passed a church letting out and people sitting on the stoops of their row houses, and I attempted to displace them temporally. I wondered if they would be engaged in similar activities hundreds of years in the past. The difficult part of this exercise was identifying what present day details would need to be left out. I finally wrote the poem as a kind of tribute to strangers, past and present, I would never know as well as the stories that would never be told, lost within the larger history lessons.