PEONIES
The peonies, too heavy with their beauty,
slump to the ground. I had hoped
they would live forever but ever so slowly
day by day they’re becoming the soil of their birth
with a faint tang of deliquescence around them.
Next June they’ll somehow remember to come alive again,
a little trick we have or have not learned.
-Jim Harrison
“I ask this much” was the title of a post I wrote ten years ago, not long after my husband died. My thoughts then were inspired by the poem below, which I recently revisited. Yesterday I began to notice afresh the near constancy of my murmuring and complaining; today I was encouraged by the testimony of my former self, who wrote back then,
And every day, I feel a great Love surrounding me, like the pleasant air that holds me and gives me oxygen even while I am having those pity parties. Or like the sun whose heat is keeping me alive and giving me energy.
Let us be up and doing! And let’s start by asking the great Maker of the sun and of us, for His light, and strength, and joy. Our asking will be the beginning of the receiving.
PRAYER at SUNRISE
O mighty, powerful, dark-dispelling sun,
Now thou art risen, and thy day begun.
How shrink the shrouding mists before thy face,
As up thou spring’st to thy diurnal race!
How darkness chases darkness to the west,
As shades of light on light rise radiant from thy crest!
For thee, great source of strength, emblem of might,
In hours of darkest gloom there is no night.
Thou shinest on though clouds hide thee from sight,
And through each break thou sendest down thy light.
O greater Maker of this Thy great sun,
Give me the strength this one day’s race to run,
Fill me with light, fill me with sun-like strength,
Fill me with joy to rob the day its length.
Light from within, light that will outward shine,
Strength to make strong some weaker heart than mine,
Joy to make glad each soul that feels its touch;
Great Father of the sun, I ask this much.
–James Weldon Johnson 1871-1938
LAY BACK THE DARKNESS
My father in the night shuffling from room to room
on an obscure mission through the hallway.
Help me, spirits, to penetrate his dream
and ease his restless passage.
Lay back the darkness for a salesman
who could charm everything but the shadows,
an immigrant who stands on the threshold
of a vast night
without his walker or his cane
and cannot remember what he meant to say,
though his right arm is raised, as if in prophecy,
while his left shakes uselessly in warning.
My father in the night shuffling from room to room
is no longer a father or a husband or a son,
but a boy standing on the edge of a forest
listening to the distant cry of wolves,
to wild dogs,
to primitive wingbeats shuddering in the treetops.
-Edward Hirsch
THE GIFT
To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.
I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.
Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.
Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.
-Li-Young Lee
Gladsome Lights 