With even a few years, the act of creation begins to blend itself with the feeling of loss, as the cycle of seasons turns round and round. Some traditions have seen the wheel as pain, where what is given is taken away, and what is made crumbles. It is perhaps the habit of all living creatures to associate the pain of loss with failure, and a single tear in the eye washes beauty away.

Spring is here, with flowers and with rain. A full life and a full heart contains them both, and the wheel might, with practice and with gentleness, be accepted as what moves the world, the galaxies in their spirals, the planets in their rotations and their orbits, the atoms in their similar equation, and our selves in the turn of life. Then each element holds a beauty, even if it is a difficult one.

I just received this poem by Donald Justice — thanks to a poetry feed from the Knopf publishers during this, our National Poetry Month. I am not sure how many of you read poetry, or have read anything beyond the required passages in your High School English classes. Some, including some of my own, can dig so deeply that it is difficult to follow. Even the more modern poems often contain images that are uncommon to our minds, and we have a tendency to furrow our brows…

When we furrow our brow, we tense up, physically (look at yourself in the mirror when you read something difficult, you will see the symptom) and internally as well. Our minds and our hearts become tense as well. Poetry is an uncommon language, because this is the age of speed-fixes and 15-second news; when we step into dense poetic language at full speed, the shock can knock us over.

So the practice — like everything, a practice — is to read slowly. Allow each idea and image to be a seed, not a fruit to devour, not a flower to cut. The clocks are sorry, the clocks are very sad. One stops, one goes on striking the wrong hours.

When we slow down, we feel. When we feel, we become human, and in that becoming we live our lives in communion with everyone and everything around us.

Psalm and Lament 

Hialeah, Florida 
in memory of my mother (1897–1974) 

The clocks are sorry, the clocks are very sad. 
One stops, one goes on striking the wrong hours. 

And the grass burns terribly in the sun, 
The grass turns yellow secretly at the roots. 

Now suddenly the yard chairs look empty, the sky looks empty, 
The sky looks vast and empty. 

Out on Red Road the traffic continues; everything continues. 
Nor does memory sleep; it goes on. 

Out spring the butterflies of recollection, 
And I think that for the first time I understand 

The beautiful ordinary light of this patio 
And even perhaps the dark rich earth of a heart. 

(The bedclothes, they say, had been pulled down. 
I will not describe it. I do not want to describe it. 

No, but the sheets were drenched and twisted. 
They were the very handkerchiefs of grief.) 

Let summer come now with its schoolboy trumpets and fountains. 
But the years are gone, the years are finally over. 

And there is only 
This long desolation of flower-bordered sidewalks 

That runs to the corner, turns, and goes on, 
That disappears and goes on 

Into the black oblivion of a neighborhood and a world 
Without billboards or yesterdays. 

Sometimes a sad moon comes and waters the roof tiles. 
But the years are gone. There are no more years.