sometimes people are listening
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.
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…
September 3rd, 2009 at 10:32 pm
That’s so amazing and sweet.
September 3rd, 2009 at 10:38 pm
That is truly moving. For the artistry of the craft, but more because of the depth of the feelings it raises. In everything you have ever written, I was always struck by the love you had, even now – expecially now. I have no doubt that being in your presence, your house would make that even more evident,
Thank you for sharing this, I am (unless you object) going to copy it for myself.
September 4th, 2009 at 5:03 am
What a remarkably apt poem!
I’ll see your Galway Kinnell and raise you a T.S Eliot:
“O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark…
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you/
Which shall be the darkness of God. As in theatre,/
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed/
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness/
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama/
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away — /…
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope/
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love/
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith/
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting./
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought;/
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Er…well, it doesn’t have any kinky double entendres so perhaps Kinnell wins.
Not to mention the comment section is a bit narrower than the way the poem is written so the breaks are in weird places.
But Kinnell’s poem on waiting you shared reminded me of my favorite T.S. Eliot excerpt.
cdm Reply:
September 4th, 2009 at 7:38 am
I love this part of “East Coker”. It is indeed apt. Actually – and this is not as freakily religious as it sounds – my spiritual director pointed me to this fragment last winter, during one of our first meetings. Blew my mind then. Reading it again now shows me something different yet again. So thanks for opening the book again for me. For all of us.
September 4th, 2009 at 9:20 am
This is a splendidly beautiful poem, Casey. As is the TS Eliot, which I had also never read. In my own time of grief, I’ve noticed how much everyday kindnesses, being treated gently by people who don’t even know me, matter. This gift is so much richer than even those wonderful gestures. I’m sure it is good to know that there are people like this still in your world.