A Consideration For Lent

Last night over beers, a guy named Kur...   Josh, you can pick it up from here.

Things not to blog about...  Oh, never mind.

I will stick with what I was going to blog about before the beers.  It is March.  In our neck of the woods it started out warmer than usual, then got windy and cold again, and then this week the blackbirds started singing.  Everything to its season.

I haven’t written any new poems lately, largely because I have been returning and spending time with older poems, some of mine for the sake of trying to improve them but more often the poems of other people.  Yes, including yours Dan, but you are in company lately with my returning to old favorites by Yeats and Whitman and Frost and Stevens.  And I am memorizing some of these poems, and in the course understanding and appreciating them more.

I never understood, for instance, what Yeats really meant by “twenty centuries of stony sleep ...vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.”  The line even troubled me.  What was doing the vexing?  The cradle?  The child within the cradle?  Could this be blasphemy?  Apostasy?  But now I know, and, as it turns out, it is a perfectly appropriate consideration for Lent.  It cannot be the cradle, an inanimate object.  It cannot be the child, who after all left the cradle and grew to become a man.  The cradle is empty, and yet for twenty centuries we have kept rocking it and ultimately setting ourselves up for some rough beast to take the child’s place.  We are the vexers - we humans, we sinners, we falcons and desert birds and attenders of ceremony. Meanwhile the man went on and suffered and died and was placed into a tomb, and now the tomb is empty, too, but we forget this and we keep circling in our widening gyre, looking for some different Easter....

I was going to share a different poem, something about blackbirds or March.  Instead I’ll give you this, my poem for Kirsten’s eight grade graduation, revised a little in the course of memorizing it.  Let your children go, but teach them well.  Sunday’s coming.