SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2025

 SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2025 - POEMS FOR TRYING TIMES

To challenge myself, I occasionally like to find poems and stores that "speak to me". Here are three such poems.

***** The Peace of Wild Things

Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

, and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I go into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world and am free.

**

Karen adds:
I generally am a sound sleeper.  But, now and then, I have despair for the world in my heart. Unlike Wendell Berry, I can’t slip out to the wood drake and the lake.  I get up - and find my favorite reclinging chair.  But I do find peace in the stillness of my apartment.  If it is real quiet, I can hear the faint clicking of my wall clock.  But, I can sit there - alone - and at peace.  Yes, like Berry,
“I rest in the grace of the world and am free.”

*****

Small Kindness

Danusha Lamers

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk

down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs

to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”

when someone sneezes, a leftover

from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.

And sometimes, when you spill lemons

from your grocery bag, someone else will help you

pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.

We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,

and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile

at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress

to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,

and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.

We have so little of each other, now. So far

from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.

What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these

fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,

have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

**

Karen adds:  Those small kindnesses do add up.  I do a living research project.  I wave at cars that approach me when I walk outside.  I can imagine the people in the car - driving to work, driving home, taking the kids to soccer practice, - whatever.  And, here is a stranger waving to me.  Like saying “Bless You”, to a sneeze, it is frequently a “jerk reaction” to wave back.  I’ve jolted them out of their regular thoughts for a second.  

I also am doing a similar things.  I signed up for the “Coffee Club” at my local convenience store.  $9.99 per month for all the coffee I want (with one exception - only one per hour, so I can’t pick up ten coffees and say they are all for me).  Now when I go in for my coffee, I wave to the clerks and say “hi”.  Likewise at the local ALDI grocery store or Walmart, I smile and talk to the clerks.  

It doesn’t hurt me to smile, greet, wave, and let love win!!

*****

Adrift, Mark Nepo

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.

This is how the heart makes a duet of

wonder and grief. The light spraying

through the lace of the fern is as delicate

as the fibers of memory forming their web

around the knot in my throat. The breeze

makes the birds move from branch to branch

as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost

in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh

of the next stranger. In the very center, under

it all, what we have that no one can take

away and all that we’ve lost face each other.

It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured

by a holiness that exists inside everything.

I am so sad and everything is beautiful.

**

Of the three poems I picked today, this one spoke to me.  There are times that I feel ‘adrift and punctured”. I try not to let it show (and I’m pretty good at hiding my negative feelings).  

But then, I try to step into other shoes.  I feel that most of us have feelings of being adrift and punctured from time to time.  I need to draw back into that “holiness that exists inside everything”.  And even though “I am so sad”, “everything is beautiful.  

God does reign - let the Earth rejoice and be glad.

LOVE WINS

LOVE, GENTLENESS, PATIENCE, AND JOY TRANSFORMS US.  We are God’s handiwork - made in His image.

Karen Anne White, February 8, 2025

(Happy Birthday - Connie White)