Everyday we read too much bad news. Today it is Sen. Franken’s resignation (and the reasons why), Don the Con’s continued assault on everything that is good and right with this country, the GOP’s assault on everything that is good and right in this country, the wildfires in California (and the reasons why), and the emerging confirmation that every detail in the Steele dossier is probably true, to name just a few news items to ruin our day.
How do we maintain our sanity? Poetry. Here are two examples having nothing to do with politics and everything to do with facets of the human condition. I hope these bring a moment or two or three, of calm to your day:
Static
The storm shakes out its sheets
against the darkening window:
The glass flinches under thrown hail.
unhinged, the television slips its hold,
streams into black and white
then silence, as the lines go down.
Her postcards stir on the shelf, tip over;
the lights of Calais trip out one by one.
He cannot tell her
How the geese scull back at twilight,
how the lighthouse walks its beam
across the trenches of the sea.
He cannot tell her how the open night
swings like a door without her,
How he is the lock
And she is the key.
Robin Robertson
In Memoriam M.K.H (1911-1984)
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—
Never closer the rest of our lives.
Seamus Heaney