“Commonality” is oft Mistaken for “Unimportance”

“Commonality” is oft mistaken for “unimportance”. Something widely liked is dismissed as common. Something familiar, something comforting, is something common. Something shared–between friends or lovers or cultures–is common.

When did any of these things cease to be beautiful?

Ada Limón asks this in her poem Dead Stars. Amidst an icy winter, the narrator slips into a cozy intimacy with the reader. This intimacy is one demonstrated by the sharing of household chores, the sharing of traditions, the sharing of dead-star bodies–by the common.

We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out

    the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.

It’s no revelation to state that taking out the trash is mundane. And yet, Limón continues on to say, “it’s almost romantic”. Though common in the sense that the vast majority of people have, at some point, taken out the trash, it is still beautiful. The stars, suspended in the cold night above this simple act, warp into the meaning ancient peoples ascribed to them. Those stories–the ones Limón confesses she struggles to remember–would have been common knowledge to the people from whom they originated. Thousands of years later, they unite Limón with her reader.

Look, we are not unspectacular things.

    We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

-Elizabeth Hudgens