The Last Word
“Poetry is a spell against death.” ~ Richard Eberhart
A poet’s job is to be brave and tell the truth. I’ve said this before in my column. When is bravery and truth-telling most difficult? For me, it is in times of despair, physical or emotional. Last month I wrote about thresholds. Despair is one.
When I lived in Minnesota I took an introductory class in Poetry Therapy.
I was open to possibility. For my MFA internship I played ‘cello on the Oncology Unit at Abbott North Western Hospital, a transformative experience. My chapbook, Window, Poems of Healing, came from that internship. I can’t not respond, even when it involves bone marrow transplants, and patients in chemo. I embarked on a brave creative challenge. I had no idea I would be changed.
I stood on the bridge of attentiveness between the islands of poetry and healing. Loss resonates in each of us. We are vulnerable. This is a hard truth. We can take our time on the bridge of mindfulness, look back, move ahead, and write. Poetry validates our experience. The following poem is an example of how to stop.
Snowbound
There is a time to stop traveling . . .
to get off other people’s subways
to halt airplanes from landing in your life.
A time to refuel yourself.
A time to be snowbound
within your own private space
where the only number you dial
is your own.
~ Natasha Lynne Vogdes
After my mother died, I was speechless. I didn’t write. I was full, but unable to empty myself. After six months, I began to write in response to art. As you can imagine, my mother was in every scene. I continue this Ekphrastic practice. To sit with a work of art, to long-look, is meditation. It is like being with nature where we find a sacred space externally and internally.
A poem can take us where we need to be, even though we may not leave our physical place at all. (From The Healing Fountain)
The Temple Bell Fades
The temple bell fades . . .
but the tolling continues
out of the flowers
~ Basho
Listening For Your Heart
Vermeer’s silence was radiant, seeping yellow
from pores of the candle and filling
his figures with light.
They still glow
Schubert’s E-flat shrieked through his silence,
gull cry intensifying the sea, or meteor
lighting the dark, noise shaking
other tones to music
My silence flashes with monitors, your heart
beneath my hand. So much beats there
daughter – my mother dead, all
the other partings
My fingers are steady, they feel your heart race
and lurch, runner too tired to hold pace.
Silence is numbers counting
your time. I will not
move my hand
~ From Intensive Care by Lucia Getsi
scar
we will learn
to live together.
i will call you
ribbon hunger
and desire
empty pocket flap
edge of before and after.
and you
what will you call me?
woman i ride
who cannot throw me
and i will not fall off.
~ From lucille clifton’s book, the terrible stories
I will end with THE poem (in my estimation) on loss, Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.”
One Art
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) disaster.
My final word comes from Miss Bishop, “Write it.”
Resources
Intensive Care, Lucia Getsi, New Rivers Press, 1992, St Paul, MN.
the terrible stories, lucille clifton, BOA editions, Brockport, NY 1996.
The Healing Fountain, Poetry Therapy for Life’s Journeys, edited by Geri Chavis and Lila Weisberger, North Star Press of St. Cloud, 2003.