The first time I read “Ding-dong,” I thought it was silly. The title sounded like a doorbell or a nursery rhyme, and the repetition felt childish. I was ready to dismiss it, the way I dismiss most things that seem simple on the surface. But something made me read it again. Maybe it was the date underneath the title—18 August 2022—which felt so recent, so ordinary. This wasn’t some artifact from a distant century; it was a poem from a time when I was already alive, scrolling on my phone, thinking my own thoughts. And that’s when the “ding-dong” stopped being a silly sound and started to feel like a heartbeat, or a clock ticking in an empty room.
What struck me, and what I can’t stop thinking about, is the way the poem holds two opposing truths in each stanza without flinching. “It’s a life, what’s going on” right beside “If i’ll die, you please be strong.” It’s all there at once: the mundane, dragging length of a boring chapter, and the immense, final fact of death. The poem doesn’t separate them. It says life *is* this ding-dong, this repetitive, ongoing noise that contains both endless afternoons and the last breath you’ll ever take. It made me realize I spend most of my time trying to escape that very feeling. I compartmentalize. School is for stress, weekends are for fun, thinking about the future is for late-night anxiety. I never let the “ding-dong” of it all just… ring.
The line that gutted me was “Looking for someone who’s gone.” It’s placed in the final stanza, after talk of dancing and not being alone. It’s so quiet, so simple. It isn’t dramatic. It’s just a statement of a permanent, everyday reality. I started thinking about my grandfather, who died when I was twelve. I don’t actively mourn him every day, but sometimes I’ll see an old man wearing a hat like his, or smell pipe tobacco, and for a split second, I’m looking for him. The poem names that. It says this, too, is part of the “sound of gong” in the mountains—a deep, echoing note for loss that is woven into the landscape of being alive.
This poem matters to me because it’s a permission slip to stop making sense. It doesn’t offer a lesson or a neat conclusion. It just says: here is the long chapter, here is the dance, here is the missing person, here is the bell. It’s all going on. Reading it felt like someone had given a shape to the vague, swirling pressure I feel in my own chest—the pressure of being seventeen, of knowing everything is supposed to be ahead of me, while simultaneously feeling the weight of every goodbye I’ve ever said. The poem doesn’t resolve that pressure. It just sits with it, and lets the “ding-dong” ring. For the first time, instead of being scared of that noise, I felt a strange kind of company. The poem made me realize I’m not waiting for my real life to start after the boring chapters. This is it. The ringing is the thing.