Archive for 2010
Literary Mileage
A World Undone
Monday, December 20th, 2010
The times are winter, watch, a world undone…
These lines from the Gerard Manly Hopkins poem I mentioned last week have an even more poignant meaning for me now than when I wrote them down a week ago. Since that time I learned of the accidental death of the husband of a long-time close friend of mine in Tulsa. I knew Charles, too, of course, but it is Marilyn I am thinking of these days as she (all of us really) try to grasp that he is gone, having died after a fall.
I’ve turned to poetry to try to find the right words. The savagery of a sudden death is a major blow to the solar plexus. Just a month ago a young neighbor died of melanoma. That was awful, yet there were clues pointing to a shortened life. Not with Charles, though. He had worked on his farm every day of his adult life, so how to comprehend a fatal fall from the hayloft?
My world is ‘undone.’ But not nearly as unraveled as Marilyn’s must be now. The outpouring of a vast circle of loving friends and family will keep her upright in the short term. Coming to terms with loss takes longer, and is more individual. Walt Whitman sounds a comforting note about death in this poem:
–Continuities–
(From a talk I had lately with a German spiritualist)
Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form—no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space—ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold—the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring’s invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.
May the sun rise for mornings and noons continual for all of us. 
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
subscribe to my blog via email
subscribe to my blog via rss
ph: 202.544.8902
fx: 202.544.2011
email: judy@jleaver.com
services »
writing samples »
past clients »
judy's resume »
judy's blog »