OF POEMS AND PRAISE
Poems are pouring out of me. It is as if they have been storing up behind some door, a door I left open only a crack while I wrote How the Light Gets In, and closed for a time of rest when I finished it. Now poems are coming. Lately, most of them have been about trouble.
I wish my work held a larger quotient of praise, but the truth is, trouble seems to be the key that opens the door for praise finally to come through.
There is a song in the African American Heritage Hymnal 169 that came to mind after I wrote that sentence:
Over my head, I see trouble in the air.
Over my head, I see trouble in the air.
Over my head, I see trouble in the air.
There must be a God somewhere!
The solitude I need for writing is mine to claim – every morning it waits for me in the dark before dawn. A single lamp beside my chair makes a small room of light in half a world of dark. It is a solitude so vast I can feel along the tiny hairs on the back of my neck, the presence. The Presence. And then I can write trouble. And then I can praise.
Who or what is the presence? When I walk out on the plank of that question, I am alone above a dark sea and below a sky full of stars. I don’t have to understand. I don’t need any name. The presence is felt, and is always intensely private.
Going backward in time, the presence takes remembered forms. When Peter left the ministry and we both left the practice of organized religion, and had no idea of how we would survive, (a story that I tell in my book, Wake Up Laughing,) there was Mrs. D’s black face, saying, “God makes a way out of no way!” When I was graduating from high school with no future but the lowest paying jobs, (a story I tell in How the Light Gets In,) there was Reverend Harris’ white face, saying, “We are going to send you to college.” When I was a five or six year old child after the storm of my mother’s divorce, there was a cyclone with no face at all, but with a breath that took away a country store across the gravel road where we lived in a rented farmhouse. It blew down four trees in our yard, one on each side of the house, each one’s top at the foot of the last, like a pencil drawing a line around the house without touching us.
After two years of not being able to do my work because of disability, I have accepted an invitation from Rowe Center to lead a weekend long “poetry party.” I want to do it – to play with poetry, write it with thirty other poets and persons who believe they cannot write poems but are brave enough to try.
I have had times of fear: can I do it? This is a time of trouble for me. Peter’s failing memory, and my left leg’s stubborn refusal to fully heal in the years since I broke the hip in a fall, are heavy challenges. But if I’m attentive, signs of grace are everywhere. The latest “synchronicity” that I take as a sign is a female cardinal at my desk-window birdfeeder whom I caught tipping, flapping one wing. I studied her and saw her lose her balance in a gust of wind. Out of her feathers, fluffed against this record-breaking storm of snow, shot a leg that had no foot. Her left leg. My left leg. A gracious sign: Observe her courage. Observe her determination to survive. Observe her beauty.
Any thing, any occurrence, any remembrance, can be suffused with presence if we are attentive. Observing the courage and endurance of one crippled, beautiful, softly red female cardinal feels a lot like being in the center of a half-written poem. And that state of being feels like praise.
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Listen to this month’s poem, posted February 15, 2015: “Truth Enough”
