In the Midst of Mounting Grief a Moment of Calm

Fall PondEllen Andreassen

 

In the midst of creeping worry and mounting grief—a moment of calm:
almost happiness, not epiphanic, simply present; and when I turned
my head to it, of course it left, but in leaving, left a warm shadow
and a pleasing shimmer that almost produced a tone, the kind one feels
the northern lights should make. I leaned in, then followed
its disappearing form, as if down a dark street within me, deep inside—
I want to say—for it took some breathing to arrive at a destination,
that, while rumoured, I hadn’t truly encountered; a terminus, the terms
of which I’d not fully undergone; an end, let’s say, without an end, which
presented as a dark stillness, that permits no entrance unless it enters you,
and isn’t there unless you expect it may be, which is not to say it’s imaginary,
instead, to see that it’s prior to you, and realer than one imagines;
for as I found myself standing there, or rather, being there,
I longed to call out some name: the thousand names of YHWH,
but couldn’t name one, and it mattered not, as I couldn’t stay,
and just as well, for now, compelled, I sent a word of care
to a family member who suffers, and checked on a friend
who has a weight on his heart, made an overdue call, wrote
a consoling email, also overdue; and now many names flooded in,
and I quietly and earnestly bowed, and prayed for them all,
and then for the millions I didn’t know, and all the while
it was though a power was going out of me.

 

For Aaron Bushnell

Photo: The Guardian

 

… for you know as well as I do that under certain circumstances, at a certain temperature, metaphorically speaking, words lose their substance, their content, their meaning, they simply deliquesce, so that in this vaporous state deeds alone, naked deeds, show any tendency to solidity, it is deeds alone that we can take in our hands, so to speak, and examine like a mute lump of mineral, like a crystal.   -Imre Kertész  (Nobel for literature, Auschwitz survivor)

Let Israel, let America, let us all,
take this naked deed in hand,
turn it this way and that, hold it to the light,
let its hard crystalline presence pierce
the darkest of hearts.

Let it mute the megaphone mouths,
clear out the senate effluent,
the podium sludge that hourly pours
into living-rooms.

Let the vaporous words of “leaders”—
their toxins so common we’ve turned immune—
finally flame out and awaken in us, 
a re-spiriting of justice and right-ness.

Let the meaningless epistles of embassies,
and the murderous euphemisms of Commanders
-in-Chief, choke in their throats,
at the wordless act of Aaron Bushnell.

And may the power of his deed
re-form, re-true our tongue,
speak its roar of enough!

 

Prayer at 3 AM for one loved and laying long in a hospital

 

Lord, lead him beside those still waters,
            those green pastures,
for his dreams glare of florescent halls,
and his thoughts are collections of knives.

An old charge, tedious for You:
if You are all powerful, all merciful,
            whence my sweet son,
who’s suffering is continual?

This is my immodest prayer,
full of accusations,
empty of understanding.

Should I pile on more praises,
change my disposition, shall I kneel in the dark,
shall I prostrate, can I offer a limb, give my life?

My heart is all will, my soul is all brain,
my prayers are connivings and deals going down.
And the more I pray
            …the further away.

You, Lord, who questions through hurricane,
and answers by absence,
arrow me a divine-thought, real as rock
and quick as light, to unwill my heart,
and re-mystify my prayer—to make of it,
            actual prayer.

Here’s what I know:
despair and pain,
like an epi-gene,
can switch on faith,
or just as soon kill it.

So lift me beyond my simmering transactions,
my heaving sea of abject solutions,
into the flickering light of fertile doubt,
            again to stand
on the dark shore of an awe-full faith.

And I will pray to give up this praying.
I will pray to You, to be free of You,
            the You of my making.

Yet this I plead, and will not cease:
            raise and release him,
back to a regular life, like all lives,
with our gales and hard weather, our
            graftings of awe and cuttings of joy.

 

Hound at my Heels

 

With His mercy like an unclaimed mongrel,
Following, still following. -Ronald Duncan

I’m ash in a respectable urn.
I’m a rock rabbit blending in.
I mimic the evasions of cicadas. I’ve learned
the trick of cuttlefish—the quick camouflage.
I’m faithless, so I’ve mastered octopi:
confronted, I slip out under a cloud of ink.

But there’s a Love,
like some hound at my heels,
that I curse at, kick at, and I run
as to outrun myself, and despite my rage,
my scorn, he never leaves my side;
runs through the day,
looks up, his wet wounded eyes,
terrible with tenderness.

On my bed, I watch through the night for an escape,
he lies at my feet, dreamily awake.
I inch to the edge,
he turns to me,
and in the quietness of his eyes,
a sheer and wild mercy,
slowly undoes my disguise.


Seventy years ago, when Ronald Duncan sat composing The Mongrel, in his stone hut, high on the Cornwall cliffs, he wasn’t thinking of hikers coming in from the trail reading his words and leaving changed, or at least momentarily arrested and marked for later. He was inscribing his own transformative arch; a time he was unmasked by, and he released himself to the love and mercy of Christ.