Category: sadness

Who I Have Offended

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He is a hard one to write a poem about. Like Napoleon.
Hannibal. Genghis Khan. Already so large in history. To do it
right, I have to sit down with him. At a place of his own
choosing. Probably a steakhouse. We take a table in a corner.
But people still recognize him, come up and slap him on the
back, say how much they enjoyed studying about him in school and ask for his autograph. After he eats, he leans back and lights up a cigar and asks me what I want to know.

Notebook in hand, I suggest that we start with the Little Big Horn and work our way back. But I realize I have offended him. That he would rather take it the other way around. So he rants on about the Civil War, the way west, the loyalty of good soldiers and now and then twists his long yellow hair with his fingers.
But when he gets to the part about Sitting Bull, about Crazy
Horse, he develops a twitch above his right eye, raises his
finger for the waiter, excuses himself and goes to the restroom
while I sit there along the bluffs with the entire Sioux nation,
awaiting his return.
~David Shumate “Custer” from High Water Mark

Bighorn Battlefield – National Park Service photo

When my family took two cross-country trips by car, once in 1963 and another in 1965, my father, a former officer and battalion leader in the Marines during WWII, was the primary driver and keeper of maps and deadlines. He could be convinced to stop at any number of state and national parks, points of interest and historical markers, but all four times we passed the sign indicating the Battle of the Little Bighorn, he would not stop despite our pleading.

“You’ve seen as much as there is up there,” he would say as we sped past, pointing at the marble monolith at the top of the hill where the battle took place. I would look around at the desolate countryside of brown grass with no trees, in the middle of nowhere, and wonder how this place could ever have warranted a battle to the death.

I was frustrated at my dad’s refusal to stop to learn more, but it was only a monument and stone gave markers. No interpretive center yet.

I had certainly learned about General George Custer’s Last Stand in my elementary school history lessons. But my interest was primarily driven by a 1958 Disney movie “Tonka Wakan” that I had seen in the theater and then later on Sunday nights on “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color.” I thought I understood the tragedy of that day from the standpoint of the U.S. Calvary and the only surviving horse Comanche, who in the Disney-imagined version of the battle, was raised and trained by a young Indian boy who turned the horse over to the calvary and then later was part of the Little Bighorn Battle in defense of Indian territory.

So I had a very skewed and Disney-fied version of history and my father was not helping me understand more deeply. It wasn’t until much later that I realized the likely reason he was so reluctant to stop and examine the history of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

My father was ashamed of it. He was a humble man who knew there could be no pride or sense of honor in that place.

He had likely been trained in his Marine Officer’s Training in 1942 to understand that the poor decision-making of a cocky, overly self-assured General led to the slaughter of five companies of the 7th Calvary Regiment as well as their Indian scouts in addition to dozens of Lakota and Dakota Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapahoe warriors.

My father had lived through three South Pacific island battles where poor decision-making was a death sentence. He didn’t feel the need to rehash a sorry history in this desolate part of Montana.

As an adult, I’ve visited the Battlefield with my husband and children several times, have learned more about what led to the battle, what took place that day and how the indigenous people of the region have memorialized the spot from their own perspective. When we approach this spot on our cross-country drives, I’m filled with regret and remorse at the loss of life and the eventual loss of a Native American culture that could never again be as it was, despite the defeat they handed to the cavalry that day. I learned more when our son lived and taught high school math on the Pine Ridge Reservation of the Lakota Sioux people and we visited the site of Wounded Knee, another tear-drenched place in U.S. Cavalry and Native American history.

We the people, most of us descendants of immigrant Americans, comprise the U.S. government and military — which has proven recently it doesn’t always make the best or wisest decisions.

War, suffering, loss and death cannot and should not be Disney-fied. History is more complex than a paragraph in a textbook, or a tweet or AI meme on social media from the White House.

We have so much to learn about our shame and our need for greater humility. We need to understand who we have offended, not just how offended we feel. We can’t hide from reality in the bathroom or drive on past the sites of these bloody conflicts, hoping it will all be forgotten.

We must never forget.

A Life-Cherishing Force

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Poetry is a life-cherishing force.
For poems are not words, after all,
but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost,
something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
~Mary Oliver from A Poetry Handbook

…I want to write with quiet hands. I
want to write while crossing the fields that are
fresh with daisies and everlasting and the
ordinary grass. I want to make poems while thinking of
the bread of heaven and the
cup of astonishment; let them be
songs in which nothing is neglected,
not a hope, not a promise. I want to make poems
that look into the earth and the heavens
and see the unseeable. I want them to honor
both the heart of faith, and the light of the world;
the gladness that says, without any words, everything.
~Mary Oliver from “Everything” from New and Selected Poems: Volume Two

Poetry may make us from time to time
a little more aware
of the deeper, unnamed feelings
which form the substratum of our being,
to which we rarely penetrate;
for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
—T.S. Eliot from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

Much of the time, on the surface, we appear a tangled mess –
a jumble of unarticulated feelings and desires, needs and wants.

Deeper down, there is a hungry soul in a place that can’t be seen.

We rarely dip in there; it can be a sore spot we are tempted to touch
but avoid doing so because of its tenderness.

The bright light of a few well chosen words can ring us like a bell;
we are struck dumb finding such clarion clarity comes
to a place so well hidden.

A rope of words drops to lift up the lost and sad and empty –
a reminder mere words can rescue and revive.

When Old and Lame

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All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.

In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine
clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;

and after noon’s heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,
three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.

Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load
a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.

When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,

and lay the shotgun’s muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.

For a hundred and fifty years, in the Pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground – old toilers, soil makers:
O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.
~Donald Hall “Name of Horses”

Today, we said goodbye to our last Haflinger mare after four decades of being a breeding farm. We have two geldings left on the farm, in their early 20’s.

I was dreading this day but knew it would eventually come.

Belinda, who I have written about here, flew from the Netherlands as a baby with her mother in 1998, bringing new bloodlines to North America from an East German Haflinger breeding program, at the time only recently accessible to breeders with the opening of the Berlin Wall.

She proved to be a great broodmare here on our farm and her foals all sold quickly to other breeders. However, her last twelve years of retirement were complicated by metabolic imbalance and a tendency toward laminitis. We finally had to make the hard choice to bring out the vet to gently help her pass with intravenous medication into eternal lush pastures she could tolerate. Then the local hauler picked her up for cremation. No bullets to the brain, no hole to be dug.

We have done our final parting with our horses in this way over our forty years of Haflinger ownership. It is certainly different from how it was done when I was a kid on a small cow and horse farm. Our family mare, Dolly, in 1965, was put down by a vet’s bullet to the head after an agonizing bout with colic. My dad sent me back to the house beforehand, not wanting me to watch. Still, I could not help but hear the gunshot as if it had gone right through me as well. It took Dad the rest of the day to dig a hole deep enough so she could be buried on our farm.

At first her grave was my place to cry where no one but the trees and wild flowers could see.

When my tears finally dried up, it was a place to sing loudly where no one but chipmunks and my dog could hear.

And before I left for college, it became the sanctuary where I retreated to talk to God when my church no longer was.

I suspect her bones lie there still, with tall trees now growing through her ribs. That dent in the ground will always betray the spot.

We’ll remember you fondly, Belinda. You traveled far to come here and gave us your best. We promised you would live here on this farm, in peace, until your last breath.

Belinda’s last evening out on pasture

That is Just the Point…

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And that is just the point…
how the world, moist and beautiful,
calls to each of us to make a new and serious response.

That’s the big question,
the one the world throws at you every morning.
“Here you are, alive.
Would you like to make a comment?”
~Mary Oliver “The Morning Poem”

It is impossible to stay a silent observer of the world when you awake still alive.

An autumn morning demands a response.

I would like to make a comment.

It isn’t only nature
pulling what was once lush and young into the ground:
we witness flying leaves and dropping temperatures
giving way to brisk winds and chill rains.

Humankind, like the change in seasons, is skilled at dying:
we face violence across borders, nurture hatred
which blusters, rips, drenches, encompasses, buries.

Nothing can remain as it was.

Yet I awake, lit and alive,
struck and wrung by vanishing darkness,
a witness to the sun rising up
to catch the moon.

Called to comment.
Dying to respond.

They Don’t Amount to a Hill of Beans

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Fifteen years ago today, family and friends lost Jenny Rausch to eternity. She is someone we will never forget and I want to share a bit about what she taught me, but also direct you to a page of her wit and wisdom — some wonderful horse stories she had written over the years.

I spent this morning adjusting to this change in season by occupying myself with the familiar task of moving manure. Cleaning barn is a comforting chore, allowing me to transform tangible benefit from something objectionable and just plain stinky to the nurturing fertilizer of the future. It feels like I’ve actually accomplished something.

As I scooped and pushed the wheelbarrow, I remembered another barn cleaning over two decades ago, when I was one of three or four friends left cleaning over ninety stalls after a Haflinger horse event that I had organized at our local fairgrounds. Some people had brought their horses from over 1000 miles away to participate for several days. Whenever horse people gather, there were inevitable personality clashes and harsh words among some participants along with criticism directed at me that I had taken very personally.

As I struggled with the umpteenth wheelbarrow load of manure, tears stung my eyes and my heart. I was miserable with regrets over people not getting along. My work did not feel worth the pain I was feeling.

My friend Jenny Rausch had stayed behind with her family to help clean up the large facility and she could see I was struggling to keep my composure. Jenny put herself right in front of my wheelbarrow and looked me in the eye, insisting I stop for a moment and listen.

“You know, none of these troubles and conflicts will amount to a hill of beans years from now. People will remember a fun event in a beautiful part of the country, a wonderful time with their horses, their friends and family, and they’ll be all nostalgic about it, not giving a thought to the infighting or the sour attitudes or who said what to whom.

So don’t make this about you and whether you did or didn’t make everyone happy. You loved us all enough to make it possible to meet here and the rest was up to us. So quit being upset about what you can’t change. There’s too much you can still do for us.”

And then she gave me a hug that I will always cherish.

During tough times which have come often in my professional life, including the difficult and controversial decisions I had to make during the COVID pandemic, Jenny’s advice replays in my mind, reminding me to stop seeking appreciation from others, or feeling hurt when harsh words come my way.

None of these things amount to a hill of beans now…

She was right about the balm found in the tincture of time. She was right about giving up being upset in order to die to myself and my self-absorption, to keep focusing outward rather than inward.

Jenny, I have remembered what you said even though at times I relapse and forget.

A few years after that day in the barn, Jenny herself spent six years vigorously living her life every day while treating a relentless cancer. The tumor spread was initially slowed in the face of her faith and intense drive to live. Over time though, she became a rusting leaf, fading imperceptibly, crumbling at the edges until she finally let go.

Her dying on this day twelve years ago did not flash brilliance, nor draw attention at the end. Her intense focus during the years of her illness had always been outward to others, to her family and friends, to the numerous healers she spent so much time with in medical offices, to her belief in the plan God had written for her and others.

Despite her intense love for her husband and young children, she let go her hold on life here. And we all had to let her go.  

Brilliance cloaks you as your focus is now on things eternal.

You were so right, Jenny. Conflicts from twenty-five years ago surely haven’t amounted to a hill of beans; all is remembered fondly by those who were part of the gathering. I especially treasure the words you wisely spoke to me as they have helped me through other tough times when I tend to focus on nurturing my own hurt feelings.

Bathing in the hurt never helps…

And I’m no longer upset that I can’t change the fact that you have left us. There is still so much you continue to do for us by staying alive in our memories. We won’t forget what you have said and written.

And so it goes…
I know we’ll catch up later.

Jenny R –photo by Ginger Kathleen Coombs

…to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
— Ellen Bass “The Thing Is…” from Mules of Love

Balancing on a Broken World

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Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet give you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic – as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! –
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Hurrahing in Harvest”

This poem is (in Hopkin’s own words) “the outcome of half an hour of extreme enthusiasm as I walked home alone one day from fishing in the [River] Elwy.”

This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight;
The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;
The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves,
And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows.
Under a tree in the park,
Two little boys, lying flat on their faces,
Were carefully gathering red berries
To put in a pasteboard box.

Some day there will be no war,
Then I shall take out this afternoon
And turn it in my fingers,
And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,
And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.
To-day I can only gather it
And put it into my lunch-box,
For I have time for nothing
But the endeavour to balance myself
Upon a broken world.
~Amy Lowell from “September 1918”

There is no point in seeing without responding; there is no way to respond without seeing.

Christian life and practice require both faith (the sight of the heart) and works (the lurch of the heart toward him in obedience).
~Kathleen Mulhern from “A Christ Sighting” from Dry Bones

Am I the only one who awoke this morning praying
today might be a day of healing between peoples,
when the barbarous becomes beautiful
and we seek to become balanced rather than broken?

A day of
no drone missiles being launched,
no threats of annihilation and winner takes all,
no one gunned down in the street,
no vehicles used as weapons,
no harsh and angry words spoken,
no child misused,
no one sold into slavery,
no one overdosing, abandoned,
homeless and starving.

Am I the only one who awakes and only seeks
to watch the clouds
to praise the heavens
to see the leaves turn color
to take out this one day and taste it
and find that it is good,
then put it away for self-keeping
to share when and if I find someone else
as hungry for grace and mercy as I am,

so as to balance myself somehow
in the beauty of this world while
teetering on its brokenness?

I am not the only one.
I know I am not…

Man Scything Hay by Todd Reifers
Sheaves of Wheat in a Field –Vincent Van Gogh
Wheat Field with Sheaves -Vincent Van Gogh

A Power Secret, Holy, and Fleet

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God empties himself
into the earth like a cloud.
God takes the substance, contours
of a man, and keeps them,
dying, rising, walking,
and still walking
wherever there is motion.
Annie Dillard from “Feast Days” in Tickets for a Prayer Wheel

Divinity is not playful.
The universe was not made in jest
but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
By a power that is unfathomably secret,
and holy, and fleet.
There is nothing to be done about it,
but ignore it,
or see. 
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

What does it feel like to be alive?
Living, you stand under a waterfall…
It is time pounding at you, time.
Knowing you are alive is watching on every side
your generation’s short time falling away
as fast as rivers drop through air,
and feeling it hit.

I had hopes for my rough edges.
I wanted to use them as a can opener,
to cut myself a hole in the world’s surface, and exit through it.
~Annie Dillard from An American Childhood

What I have been after all along
is not an explanation but a picture.
This is the way the world is, altar and cup,
lit by the fire from a star that has only begun to die.
My rage and shock at the pain and death
of individuals of my kind is the old, old mystery,
as old as man but forever fresh,
and completely unanswerable.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I came here to study hard things – rock mountain and salt sea –
and to temper my spirit on their edges.

“Teach me thy ways, O Lord” is, like all prayers, a rash one,
and one I cannot but recommend.

The Cascade Range, in these high latitudes, backs almost into the water. There is only a narrow strip, an afterthought of foothills and farms sixty miles wide, between the snowy mountains and the sea.
These mountains — Mount Baker and the Sisters and Shuksan,
the Canadian Coastal Range and the Olympics on the peninsula —
are surely the edge of the known and comprehended world….

That they bear their own unimaginable masses and weathers aloft,
holding them up in the sky for anyone to see plain,
makes them, as Chesterton said of the Eucharist,
only the more mysterious by their very visibility and absence of secrecy.
~Annie Dillard from  Holy the Firm

Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape,
to discover at least where it is that we have been
so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

The shadow’s the thing.
If I no longer see shadows as “dark marks,” as do the newly sighted,
then I see them as making some sort of sense of the light.
They give the light distance; they put it in its place.
They inform my eyes of my location here, here O Israel,
here in the world’s flawed sculpture,
here in the flickering shade of the nothingness
between me and the light.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

We are here to abet creation and to witness it,
to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed.
Together we notice not only each mountain shadow
and each stone on the beach but we notice
each other’s beautiful face and complex nature
so that creation need not play to an empty house.
~Annie Dillard from The Meaning of Life (1991 Life Magazine)

But time is one thing we have been given,
and we have been given to time.
Time gives us a whirl.
We keep waking from a dream we can’t recall,
looking around in surprise,
and lapsing back, for years on end.
All I want to do is stay awake,
keep my head up, prop my eyes open,
with toothpicks, with trees. …
You don’t run down the present…
You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

An infant is a pucker of the earth’s thin skin; so are we.
We arise like budding yeasts and break off;
we forget our beginnings.
A mammal swells and circles and lays him down.
You and I have finished swelling;
our circling periods are playing out,
but we can still leave footprints in a trail whose end we do know.
~Annie Dillard from For the Time Being

The world is wilder in all directions,
more dangerous and bitter,
more extravagant and bright.
We are making hay
when we should be making whoopee;
we are raising tomatoes
when we should be raising Cain or Lazarus.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts?

Why are we reading, if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage and the hope of meaningfulness, and press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?

What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and which reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?

Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love?

We still and always want waking.
~Annie Dillard from “Write Till You Drop”

Annie Dillard passed into glory yesterday at age 81, finally witnessing firsthand the holy and sacred mysteries she pondered in her writings.

Since 1974, I have been indebted to her God-given gifts of observation and unique ability to share precisely perfect words to describe how she felt about what she saw. In 1976, she did a reading locally – I was amazed at her insistence that we all have the power to open our eyes to this place we have been set down, to witness all that is secret, holy and fleet in our existence…

She indeed left her mark while living, teaching and writing here in Whatcom County for a time nearly fifty years ago…

All the photos on this page are from my collection of pictures I’ve taken here in Whatcom County, as I can imagine this scenery inspired Annie in her writing while she was here.

We are invited by Christ Himself to “come and see.” (John 1:39)

We weren’t conceived by random happenstance –

We are here because we were earnestly needed and wanted,
by a power and divinity with a capacity for love and compassion
beyond anything we are capable of.

We aren’t a cosmic joke,
or random couplings of DNA.
We aren’t pawns in the universe’s chess game.

We have the capacity to see
the image of God in one another,
as well as in the mirror,
yet we ignore with our own eyes,
His shimmering reflection.

…beauty and grace are performed
whether or not we will or sense them.
The least we can do is try to be there…
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent.
You can heave your spirit into a mountain
and the mountain will keep it, folded,
and not throw it back as some creeks will.
The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty;
I live there. But the mountains are home.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Autumn Begins to be Inferred

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Autumn begins to be inferred
By millinery of the cloud,
Or deeper color in the shawl
That wraps the everlasting hill.
~Emily Dickinson from “Summer Begins to Have the Look”

The passing of the summer fills again
my heart with strange sweet sorrow, and I find
the very moments precious in my palm.
Each dawn I did not see, each night the stars
in spangled pattern shone, unknown to me,
are counted out against me by my God,
who charges me to see all lovely things…
~Jane Tyson Clement from “The Passing of Summer”

September’s Baccalaureate
A combination is
Of Crickets — Crows — and Retrospects
And a dissembling Breeze

That hints without assuming —
An Innuendo sear
That makes the Heart put up its Fun
And turn Philosopher.
~Emily Dickinson “September’s Baccalaureate”


There’s something in my very blood that owns
Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate
A thread of water, churned to milky spate
Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.
~Elinor Wylie from “Wild Peaches”

Summer now is waning and wistful; 
it has the look of packing up, and moving on without bidding adieu or looking back over its shoulder. 

Cooling winds have carried in darkening clouds with a hint of spit from the sky as I gaze upward to see (and smell) the change. 

A decent rain is long overdue yet there is temptation to bargain for a little more time. Though we are in need of a good drenching there are still onions and potatoes to pull from the ground, berries to pick before they mold on the vine, tomatoes not yet ripened, corn cobs just too skinny to pick. 

I’m not quite ready to wave goodbye to sun-soaked clear skies.

The overhead overcast is heavily burdened with clues of what is coming: earlier dusk, the feel of moisture, the deepening graying hues, the briskness of breezes. 

There is no negotiation possible.   I need to steel myself and get ready, wrapping myself in the soft shawl of inevitability.

So autumn advances with the clouds, taking up residence where summer has left off.  Though there is still clean up of the overabundance left behind, autumn will bring its own unique plans for display of a delicious palette of hues.

The truth is we’ve seen nothing yet.

Emerging Transformed

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The ghosts swarm.
They speak as one 
person. Each
loves you. Each
has left something undone.

Today’s edges
are so sharp

they might cut
anything that moved.

The way a lost
word

will come back
unbidden.

You’re not interested
in it now,

only
in knowing
where it’s been.
~Rae Armantrout from “Unbidden” in Versed

I wish for you the blessing
of a room where strangers sit
breathing unashamed
into a chosen silence

Not the gasping breath
of travelers on a crowded plane
or the tenuous wheeze
of the waiting room

May you know the power
of those who have decided
to submit to the silence
to enter the mystery
be consumed by it
and emerge transformed

May you belong among those
who inhale the stillness
as if it is keeping us
because it is
keeping us alive
~Bethany Lee, “To Enter the Mystery” from Etude for Belonging: poems for practicing courage and hope

The grace of God means something like:
Here is your life.
You might never have been, but you are…
Here is the world.
Beautiful and terrible things will happen.
Don’t be afraid.
I am with you.
~Frederick Buechner in “Wishful Thinking and later” in Beyond Words

We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed;
perplexed, but not in despair;
persecuted, but not abandoned;
struck down, but not destroyed…

Therefore we do not lose heart.
Though outwardly we are wasting away,
yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.
For our light and momentary troubles
are achieving for us an eternal glory
that far outweighs them all.

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen,
but on what is unseen.
For what is seen is temporary,
but what is unseen is eternal.
-2 Cor 4:8-9, 16-18

I believe like a child
that suffering will be healed and made up for,
that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions
will vanish like a pitiful mirage
…that in the world’s finale,
at the moment of eternal harmony,
something so precious will come to pass
that it will suffice for all hearts,
for the comforting of all resentments,
for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity,
for all the blood that they’ve shed;
that it will make it not only possible to forgive
but to justify all that has happened.
~Fyodor Dostoevsky from The Brothers Karamazov

Twenty-five years ago,
a day started with bright sun above
and ended in tears and bloodshed below.

This is a day for recollection;
we live out a remembrance of
the torrential red that flowed that day;

A quarter century later,
our streets both near and far-away
still course with the blood of innocents,
so what have we learned from all this?

That terrible day’s edges were so sharp
we all bled;
still bearing the scars,
we need comforting.

So do not be afraid:
you are not alone.

We breathe and weep and love
as we remember that day,
emerging inevitably transformed.

This Failing Light

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Day after day, day after still day,
The summer has begun to pass away.
Starlings at twilight fly clustered and call,
And branches bend, and leaves begin to fall.
The meadow and the orchard grass are mown,
And the meadowlark’s house is cut down.

The little lantern bugs have doused their fires,
The swallows sit in rows along the wires.
Berry and grape appear among the flowers
Tangled against the wall in secret bowers,
And cricket now begins to hum the hours
Remaining to the passion’s slow procession
Down from the high place and the golden session
Wherein the sun was sacrificed for us.

A failing light, no longer numinous,
Now frames the long and solemn afternoons
Where butterflies regret their closed cocoons.
We reach the place unripe, and made to know
As with a sudden knowledge that we go
Away forever, all hope of return
Cut off, hearing the crackle of the burn-
ing blade behind us, and the terminal sound
Of apples dropping on the dry ground.
~Howard Nemerov “Summer’s Elegy” from Collected Poems

As far as I can see this autumn haze
That spreading in the evening air both ways,
Makes the new moon look anything but new,
And pours the elm-tree meadow full of blue,
Is all the smoke from one poor house alone
With but one chimney it can call its own;
So close it will not light an early light,
Keeping its life so close and out of sight
No one for hours has set a foot outdoors
So much as to take care of evening chores.
The inmates may be lonely women-folk.
I want to tell them that with all this smoke
They prudently are spinning their cocoon
And anchoring it to an earth and moon
From which no winter gale can hope to blow it,—
Spinning their own cocoon did they but know it.
~Robert Frost “The Cocoon”

The summer ends, and it is time
To face another way. Our theme
Reversed, we harvest the last row
To store against the cold, undo
The garden that will be undone.
We grieve under the weakened sun
To see all earth’s green fountains dried,
And fallen all the works of light.
You do not speak, and I regret
This downfall of the good we sought
As though the fault were mine. I bring
The plow to turn the shattering
Leaves and bent stems into the dark,
From which they may return. At work,
I see you leaving our bright land,
The last cut flowers in your hand.
~Wendell Berry “The Summer Ends” from A Timbered Choir.

I too regret the closed cocoon,
so seemingly safe at the time —
once launched before being ready,
there is no returning.

In this fading, failing light, I feel undone,
weepy at harvest, gathering urgently,
not wanting anything to go to waste,
trying to memorialize it all as it changes.

I part again from you, Summer –
your gifts seemed endless
until you yourself ended –
a reminder that someday,
so must I.

photo by Bob Tjoelker