I renounced empathy, sure that its burdens enervated to dangerous, perhaps lethal, levels. I even wrote a poem demonstrating how empathy destroys one who willingly acquires the wounds of others without at all insuring that those others will not be visited by such pains again and again.* Empathy, I argued in the poem, is beside the point. Nonetheless, I cannot stop myself from feeling what my lover feels when he despairs; I ache, often more deeply than he. Where to go now? I learned of the meditation practice of tonglen in which we acknowledge the suffering of others enough to alchemize an apprehension of reality that can be expressed to the injured, the distressed, and beyond them to the world. I might call it poetry.

your pain I inhale
transubstantiate
exhale inspire

* “De-Empathize, or Escape The Wheel” in Isele Magazine: The Reborn Issue (April 30, 2022); link retrieved on 23 December 2023:
https://iselemagazine.com/2022/04/30/de-empathize-james-penha/

James Penha

Expat New Yorker James Penha (he/him🌈) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry.