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The World Is Too Much With Us

Leila Chatti

^—after^{William Wordsworth}

The world is too much with us. Late and soon
it’s morning, phone in hand, and a screen on my wrist powers
on to report the no rest I had. News, a tragedy—so easily ours—
already breaking as I crack my eggs. Rage and prayers, rage and prayers, a boon
for the tycoon’s fear-campaign, clicks for the zillionaire buying up the moon.
Ad, ad, an AI figment, someone squawking, someone hawking—hours
consumed, of this only life, and who is left in the garden, who is tending the flowers?
I am trying to hear the birdsong through the auto-tune
of all this ubiquitous engineered crooning, but a podcast informs me silence will be
extinct by the weekend, gone like thought and the good kind of alone. Peace is outworn;
it’s chaos that feeds the algorithm, no likes for the actual, the tangible. No lea
without a billboard promising Hell as if it isn’t here. But don’t be forlorn,
I’m sold—the world is yours! (after this ad) unending and enhanced on a screen. Don’t mind the sea
at the door. Time for a selfie, suggests my phone. A filter. I can add (for free!) horns.

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian American poet and the author of Wildness Before Something Sublime (Copper Canyon Press, 2025); Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize and the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry; Tunsiya/Amrikiya (Bull City Press, 2018); and Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018).

Themes

About this Poem

“I wrote this poem after reading William Wordsworth’s because it would not leave my mind. How are we grappling with the same problems, two hundred years later? There’s so much disconnect in our world, so much wrong being done, and for terrible reasons. As Wordsworth writes in his original, ‘We have given our hearts away.’ I wanted to write an echo of sorts, a response to his poem for our current time, so I used his first line and all of the same end words, in their original order.”
—Leila Chatti

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I Went Out to Hear

The sound of quiet. The sky
indigo, steeping
deeper from the top, like tea.
In the absence
of anything else, my own
breathing became obscene.
I heard the beating
of bats’ wings before
the air troubled above

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Still Life with Hemorrhage

A wine crate for a nightstand, and on it, a rose
gone bad in a cup. Its water

a swallow of shadow, murk of rot
and sugar. Clothes sloughed, bodiless, and half-

eaten on a plate,
a plum in its juice. At the center

of the scene: a woman on a mattress
on the floor. Her arms cast out

as if preparing to fly
or as if pinned, savior

or specimen. Still asleep.
Day breaking through the window

a warm leak.
The woman in its spotlight

like a halo. As if something holy,
or at least chosen.

Leila Chatti

2020

After Touching You, I Think of Narcissus Drowning

How desire is a thing I might die for. Longing a well,
a long dark throat. Enter any body

of water and you give yourself up
to be swallowed. Even the stones

know that. I have writhed
against you as if against the black

bottom of a deep pool. I have emerged
from your grip breathless

and slicked. How easily
I could forget you

Leila Chatti

2021

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The World Is Too Much With Us

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