Linked Arms

“Spirit Island” Claude Boocock, Jasper Artists Guild

 

For the people of Jasper, Alberta.
For a friend who has heard hard news, and said, “It was like a bomb going off.”
For you, children of our unfinished creation, who know loss, suffering,
and still go to the aid of other people.


Linked Arms

When K. D. Lang sings Leonard Cohen’s, Hallelujah, the world must weep,
and should you hear the song before dawn and have it catch you
before the day’s hypnosis of busyness, you too, in that haltering,
blinking, moment, of being open to the utter reality of other people,
may weep, and suddenly, intimately, know the hurt
and loneliness a stranger endures, some child undergoes,
or some other burdened soul in our universal circle, bears,
and in the suffering of this necessary knowing, the given anguish
of compassion, you are carried into the morning—
actively human, and awake.

For we are not people who have seen the light,
we are, every one of us, broken hallelujahs,
we feel the chill of parting, the noose/abyss of loss, the cut of pain,
and we spend part of each day praying, for ways to carry on,
and after our bargaining is done, after the song ends, it turns out,
we do not carry on by way of revelation, or by any private victory,
or by devotion or special discipline, or by being on the side of right,
we rise, find our bearing and stand, only,
by way of linked arms.

 

14 Comments

  1. Thank you for this. I weep for the losses of those in Jasper and the collective loss of the whole community.

  2. Stephen, you have a gift for making immediate the sense of grief and loss of others (or ourselves), combined with the immediacy of invitation to hold and share in it out of love.

    I just looked up the definition of pathos: That quality or property of anything which touches the feelings or excites emotions and passions, esp., that which awakens tender emotions, such as pity, sorrow, and the like; contagious warmth of feeling, action, or expression; pathetic quality.

    You do this so well and bring us into willingness to care and link arms as best we can. Thank you.

  3. Thank you. We were camping in Jasper 2 weeks before the fire. Weeping at the loss of what we often called our second home.

  4. Thank you for these beautiful words of grief and hope, Steve. You honour the individual and collective losses so well.

  5. Thank you Stephen, for this poignant reminder that we are not alone, that we as humans share a common grief.

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