Looking With the Right Kind of Eyes

Perhaps the World Ends Here, a poem by Joy Harjo is a poem that focuses on a kitchen table. The poem evokes a comforting, soft feeling, the kind that makes you remember your own kitchen table growing up. The table is exemplified as a silent observer, a giver of sustenance and a source of love and hominess. “The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table.” Harjo, like Dillard writes of the intricacy, wonder and beauty of something that is simple and ordinary, on the surface only performing a basic function. The reader is relieved thinking of the table as something simple when reminded of how many events take place at the table, the emotions felt, the times past, the memories shared. This idea appears often in Dillard’s text, as she delves into how intricate everything is in the world. “Even on the perfectly ordinary and clearly visible level, creation carries on with intricacy unfathomable.” (Dillard, 133) Dillard conducts her pilgrimage through nature by closely observing and absorbing her environment. By insects, she is spellbound; she spends years developing the skill of stalking muskrats, creatures not usually associated with the awe-inspiring.
Perhaps the World Ends Here begins with “The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.” The poem goes onto say how wars begin and end at the table, how happiness, sadness, birth and death are all experienced at the table. I think the poem implies that everything that is felt at the table is just as important as the function the table executes. What happens there is life. One must only open their eyes and see the right way.