Another Short Poem By William Stafford

A DECK WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

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An excellent motto, one of my lifelong favorites: "Some haystacks don't even have any needle." But some friends I mentioned it to recently immediately objected to my choice, finding it "utterly depressing." I was confused! This is a hopeful little poem, full of optimism. But no matter how I defended it, my audience just couldn't see how. They said, "Searching and searching forever and never finding anything? How is that optimistic?"

Now this was bewildering indeed! I was first attracted to these William Stafford poems back in high school when we studied from a poetry book entitled Some Haystacks Don't Even Have Any Needle. I was so taken with this anthology that I squirreled my copy away at the end of the year, claiming to have lost it, so that I could pay the replacement fine and keep the book to myself. A few years later, William Stafford came to speak at my college and I was honored to interview him for our literary magazine and ask him to autograph my book, the title of which was taken from his sequence of short poems included as the anthology's closing selection.

So, back to the present, why was the message suddenly coming across all wrong?

Then I had a "Eureka" moment and realized that the reader needs the title of the poem in order to grasp its liberating message that you don't always have to be searching for a needle in a haystack, performing a goal - oriented task, or striving for a particular outcome. Sometimes you can just take the haystack for what it is (think Monet), maybe even jump into the haystack with joy, as into a snowdrift or a pile of leaves, and with confidence that there's nothing hidden there to hurt you, no puzzle to solve.

At last, here's the poem complete with title:

"AN ARGUMENT AGAINST THE EMPIRICAL METHOD

Some haystacks don't even have any needle."

(short poem by William Stafford)