You Can’t Get There All at Once

Sometimes the only thing to do is keep writing poems.  

     I’ve been working on this poem for several years, and after the results of last Tuesday’s election, in my shock and dismay, I got it out and revised it again.

    I think of the second letter of Peter, the idea that “God’s patience is directed towards our salvation” (3:15).   I think of a term I read somewhere, “eschatological patience,” the idea that we must all wait for completion and fulfillment in a distant future.  I think of “the whole of creation groaning” as it evolves ever closer to God (Romans 8:23).

You Can’t Get There All at Once               

The man in the bucket says he won’t stop.  

He idles only long enough to shout no, then gooses

his chainsaw and starts screaming again, biting 

into the bare and twisting branches of a tree 

in someone’s front yard.  He is young and strong, 

hardhat dented.  But when I cross the street to 

the cemetery where the family waits, it’s suddenly

quiet—the shrieking has ceased—we can

stand by the grave and grieve.  You can’t get 

there all at once.  Everything takes time.  We say 

the prayers we need to say and lay the body 

to rest, and when I get back to my car and open 

the door, the man in the bucket looks down

for just a beat, face blank, then turns and yanks 

on his chainsaw, resuming his terrible work, 

lopping and shaping, revising the tree.

November 5, 2024

     We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.  And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—and that it may take a very long time.  Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

            Teilhard de Chardin

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