supplicium post mortem

Sometimes people are listening, and hearing, more than you imagine. A week or so ago I had a cookout for some friends from church who had known M well. They are very kind, but I can’t say I know them that well outside church. Then yesterday, at the end of a highly frustrating and quite emotional day, I got around to sifting through the mail, which I typically find oppressive, and found a card from one of the people who’d been to my house. It was a very beautiful handmade thing and inside was a piece of paper with this poem on it:

Wait

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

– Galway Kinnell

I’ve never heard of this poet or read this poem, but as you can imagine I was in tears, not merely because it is a moving poem, but from the surprise of it arriving as and when it did. And I realized the sender had seen me more truly than I recognized, or perhaps saw the love that still lingers in this house, and then through an act of compassion came to feel with me. The card said nothing more than xxooxx + a signature. I do pray everyday for help, big help. Sometimes it comes, and turns out to have been on its way for some time.

Hair will become interesting. Pain will become interesting. Their memories are what give them the need for other hands…