Chesterton, j’ai affaire avec vous. Pas ici. À suivre.
No matter where life takes me,
I carry this love. I carry my part.
This ending to Aaiún Nin’s long-ish discursive poem “McDonald’s Money” made me cry. Not from sadness, but because it crowns a fine writing with the keen point that love is a shared burden we take up and carry with devotion; also because I know more of it now than when I was younger and stupider.
It’s the third of three poems by Nin in Poetry, July-August 2026. All three teach me something about the craft and art of it: Equally relevant to how something is said is the selectivity deployed in what is said. That may sound ridiculously truistic, but for me it captures something of the purity I respond to in Nin’s deceptively unguarded plainspokenness and declarative finesse. Consider the phrase, [You] Hold me back to life. Of course poets choose their content and words! The trick is to choose well.
One of Nin’s three poems is so short that I venture to quote it entirely here:
In the Camp
In the camp they cannot pronounce my name
So they have given me a new one
I have lost everything
Ask me my name
Please ask me my name
(Aaiún Nin)
(c) 2026 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
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