A new poem, as Fort Hood mourns its dead

I did not follow much of the coverage of the Fort Hood tragedy. Too much misinformation, too much speculation, too many conclusions jumped to, and too little insight into the full spectrum of very human conditions which contributed to it.

As Thanksgiving approaches, my thoughts turn to the survivors and loved-ones of those involved… and to everyone who was affected by it. Thanksgiving for me is as much about loss as it is about gratitude. It is a season when I am keenly reminded of those who are no longer around, those who have passed out of my life… places and things and aspects of my life which are now beyond my reach.

Perhaps it’s the proximity of Halloween and All Souls. Or perhaps it’s just the normal course of life. Who can say? But summer is over, autumn is giving way to winter, and the days grow shorter with each passing week. The loss of light, in itself, is a significant loss — even if there is promise of its return.

I have had my share of losses in this life, and there will always be empty seats at the tables where I sit during the holidays. We cannot love without losing, I believe. And we cannot gain without sacrificing first. Of course, some sacrifices are a hell of a lot more painful than others…

But enough of my prattle. For all those who have lost, and (like me) are reminded of it this time of year, this is for you.


Requiem for Healed Griefs

A week later, it is still HERE. No relief in sight.

A month later… WTF?! Three letters are about all one can muster.

A year later, one would imagine
it will all disperse like so many fall leaves after
several rainfalls
and a handful of hard frosts.
The shock, the guilt, the accusations un-
spoken, yet deeply felt, the fault, the fault… and more
faulty wires crossed between family members far-
flung to disparate lives, sparking
in the dessicated tinder of old hurts
unhealed, bursting
minor incidents into major-
league blow-outs… like a bobbled infield hit can so quickly
turn into a triple…

A year later — yes, all twelve months’ worth — one would
think, the hurt could lessen, the anguish
could fade, the jagged edges
of loss-loss-loss would soften. But

no

Two years after The Loss
That Dares Not Speak Its Name, one would think
it would be just a little bit easier to sit
in the same room as others
grieving. Some still taking it harder
than others. But

no

it is not enough time. Two years is twenty-four months, is
730 days (or 731 if a leap year happens), and that adds
up to over a million individual minutes of individual
pain.
That’s way
too many minutes to think about grieving.
Too much time to spend being it, as well.
We know that. We know — we think — better
than to let it get us down.
But loss is loss.
And I don’t care what folks say — time does not
heal all wounds.
Two years is not nearly enough to make
sense of much of anything.

Three years later, aren’t we all
feeling foolish and a little self-indulgent, still
smarting from time’s lash…
Those who grieve hard — still — cannot help but
wish their pain will last
as long as they breathe, the measure
of their anguish
being the measure of their devotion
to their long-lost loved one’s memory. To pry
their grieving grasp from around their treasured memories, to try
to talk them into trading tear-soaked-soggy sack-
cloth and ashes for a comfortable house dress… Well,
that would be
just plain cruel.

Four years after that terrible, terrible
weekend/week/evening/event, some
still ache as though it happened yesterday, and they
cannot help but
suspect
those who claim to have moved
on…

and in the middle
stand
the ones who can see
both sides…

they’re the ones who hurt either half
or twice
as much, depending
on the movements of the moon
and the configuration of the seasonal sunlight
on scenes once shared with the one
who’s passed.

Grief is not like an autumn leaf suc-
cumbing to persistent elements.
It is a season, in itself.

Ethereal

The ancients trusted their guts -- they knew
as well as we (but were braver in the saying) that
all we are,
all we have ever been,
all we will ever be, is made of
air.

Breathe in... breathe out... there's magic in that -- the stuff of life
ingested from invisibility, the building
blocks of flesh and bone
loved
into the palpable. Breathe in... breathe out... there's magic in that.

They call it "stepping down", that chain of commands
from saint
to teacher
to student
to life,
the pulling out of the atmosphere those invisible lessons that should make us brave
and noble
and good
and kind, those traits all too rare that should make us
much more than animals and a little less
than angels,
traits
that are rarely measured, except
by the good wishes and good-bye parties and the sorrows of those left behind,
whether by job transfer
or dropped-body passing... all of us along the way
hoping
that life will give to student,
who will tell teacher,
who will show saint,
that this life dwelled among pulsing veins and moving fluids and the tyranny
of the anxious loveless and the rise and fall
of wishfully
affectionate ways amongst onetime strangers
is one of those things
that truly matter,
that really counts
for something.

How do we number the ways that we fall -- for things, for people, for ideas, for all those qualities
we crave? In falling,
we rise --
to the ethers,
to the upper, purer air above us,
to the celestial realms that have meaning for us now
only in shadow
and unenunciated veneration for ritual and symbol that,
no longer in style, molder
among winsome monks and devoted nuns of every ilk. All of it,
again,
is made of air,
ether,
that stuff that the ancients had full faith was the root of their existence, folding
over into their tolerance for mystery, much higher
than ours... their need of it,
their trust in it, exceeding the capacity of modern logic.

We want,
we want,
how we want,
how much we want. Putting
our fingers on what it is we really desire
for ourselves, is no more easy
than counting motes of dust aloft in a sunbeam, and half the time
we kid others
into thinking we want it for them, when truth
mumbles
something
less noble, less
easily justified and quantified, but far
closer to bone and flesh and pulsing fluid than slips comfortably past our lips.

The ancients trusted
our guts -- they said what we are
too cowardly to admit -- that
all we are,
all we have ever been,
all we will ever be, is made of
air.

Breathe in... breathe out... there's magic in that.

So, I was whining to a friend, the other day...

... about how my "issues" are being a real PITA, and how people along the way have encouraged me to set my sights in life lower, because of my various challenges.

My friend had this to say in return:

If everyone with issues settled for a less ambitious life, we'd have no electricity, no cars, women wouldn't learn past third grade, and NO ART would exist.

That beat of the different drummer is the beat of tomorrow. If those who hear it are beaten into believing that the drumbeat is dangerous, we as a culture have no future.

... You know what it's like to fail, you know what it's like to not work with your gifts. You know that the second option is worse. You feel it.

I was just thinking on my way to work that I am starting to understand what I have gained by continuing to work in this toxic environment. Every day I've been demeaned. I've been sterilized hourly. Every day I have watched my work be erased. My most precious products have been decreed dangerous to society. So every hour I have had to use my core to remind myself that I have worth, intelligence, and that my version of history is valid. I see now that a habit has formed. I live from my core now, I can't help but believe in myself because I am all that I've had for months. What an amazing habit to gain. (This is not to degrade the importance of you and my other friends. I'm talking about the moments when I needed to walk the path myself.)

It's your path. Choose your companions carefully. "To thine own self be true" isn't just advice. It's a warning that any other decision will erase you.

I just had to share that. I'm still savoring the feel of it.

Good thoughts.

So, yes, I'm sure some folks along the way who have encouraged me to be very, very careful have been trying to protect me from failure, but personally I'd rather give it my all and give my life a good shot, than play it safe and miss out. It's just hard to know how to balance their best of intentions with the Life that has a way of pushing its way to the top with me... and somehow manages to make them Very, Very Nervous.

Well, it's all a grand adventure anyway, so why not live it like one?

Ha -

I was talking to someone today about my blog, how it's been my intention to post my poetry regularly, but the process of weeding and culling and sorting just gets to be too much. Yah. Way too much.

Anyway, the year is drawing to an end, and here I am again, looking at the resolutions I came up with last year (or over the course of this year), and I'm thinking about how I can make good on them, still.

One of my big promises to myself was that I was going to post my poetry online. I've got these books of poems, all nicely formatted and looking ever so tidy in printed form.

I should promote them, you say? Honestly, who has the time for marketing it all? I just haven't got the urge. I'd much rather be writing, than promoting, anyway (and I know, Virginia, that today's writer must be their own promoter, too, but dangit, I jest don' feel like it!)

What ever happened to the honor in just being a writer...? What ever happened to the accomplishment of actually putting words together in a cogent form that folks can actually access? I mourn the days when it was enough to have a thorough grasp of the deep-and-wide-and-highly-textured English language, in order to write and read poetry. What's happened to us all, that we have to go through all those aesthetic contortions to be taken "seriously"? I just don't get it...

And I think back to one of my college buddies who was adopted as a literary protege by one of the English dept. profs. He was cultivated and sponsored and encouraged, and I seem to remember he was pretty good at the verse work. It looked like he was all set in his literary life... getting noticed by magazines... connecting with the right editors... Then my life took a sharp turn to the left-right-left, and off I went into the wild blue yonder.

I always assumed this guy had done well for himself, and I would occasionally check literary mags to see if he'd made it. No sign of him. And then while I was watching MTV, back in the summer of 1993, lo and behold, there he was on the roof of the MTV beach house, cigarette and beer bottle (still) in hand, looking way ragged, way dissipated, and eminently un-literary. Funny, how those things go. It was sad. But also wickedly sweet. More sad, though.

But wait, I think I've digressed... Back to the poetry...

I think it's time for a new strategy that lets me just get the work up there, without having to do all the editorial labor. I've got way too much material, to spend time figuring out what to post when. I'll just start at the beginning and work my way through. Or, even better, I'll just post the friggin' pdfs of the books I produced, and be done with it.

That's better. I hate getting bogged down in old stuff. I do want to honor the past, and give it its due after all it's done to make me the person I am. But it is old, and it is past, and I need to make room for What's Next.

Now... Back to the blogging business. I must more of it. Because my life has gotten a lot more interesting, all of a sudden, and I find that (as I clean out my study at home), I'm ditching a bunch of old crapola and finding areas in my life magically opened up for closer scrutiny.

It's wild, how life twists and turns the way it does. How tossing out three long filing cabinet drawers full of old papers (that used to mean something to me, but are no longer of use to me at all) can prompt me to think about one of the streets I grew up on, and the elementary schools I attended...

Anyway, I'm rambling. It's almost 8 p.m., and I've had a long day. My clothes dryer is broken and awaiting repairs (so sparks stop flying out the back -- how's that for excitement?), my laptop hard drive is making weird grinding noises that remind me to backup anything I care about, and this morning we had a gorgeous layer of frosty whiteness all over things that were very much alive during the summer.

There is much to celebrate. So I shall.

A new poem, as Fort Hood mourns its dead

I did not follow much of the coverage of the Fort Hood tragedy. Too much misinformation, too much speculation, too many conclusions jumped to, and too little insight into the full spectrum of very human conditions which contributed to it.

As Thanksgiving approaches, my thoughts turn to the survivors and loved-ones of those involved… and to everyone who was affected by it. Thanksgiving for me is as much about loss as it is about gratitude. It is a season when I am keenly reminded of those who are no longer around, those who have passed out of my life… places and things and aspects of my life which are now beyond my reach.

Perhaps it’s the proximity of Halloween and All Souls. Or perhaps it’s just the normal course of life. Who can say? But summer is over, autumn is giving way to winter, and the days grow shorter with each passing week. The loss of light, in itself, is a significant loss — even if there is promise of its return.

I have had my share of losses in this life, and there will always be empty seats at the tables where I sit during the holidays. We cannot love without losing, I believe. And we cannot gain without sacrificing first. Of course, some sacrifices are a hell of a lot more painful than others…

But enough of my prattle. For all those who have lost, and (like me) are reminded of it this time of year, this is for you.


Requiem for Healed Griefs

A week later, it is still HERE. No relief in sight.

A month later… WTF?! Three letters are about all one can muster.

A year later, one would imagine
it will all disperse like so many fall leaves after
several rainfalls
and a handful of hard frosts.
The shock, the guilt, the accusations un-
spoken, yet deeply felt, the fault, the fault… and more
faulty wires crossed between family members far-
flung to disparate lives, sparking
in the dessicated tinder of old hurts
unhealed, bursting
minor incidents into major-
league blow-outs… like a bobbled infield hit can so quickly
turn into a triple…

A year later — yes, all twelve months’ worth — one would
think, the hurt could lessen, the anguish
could fade, the jagged edges
of loss-loss-loss would soften. But

no


Two years after The Loss
That Dares Not Speak Its Name, one would think
it would be just a little bit easier to sit
in the same room as others
grieving. Some are still taking it harder
than others. But

no

it is not enough time. Two years is twenty-four months, is
730 days (or 731 if a leap year happens), and that adds
up to over a million individual minutes of individual
pain.
That’s way
too many minutes to think about grieving.
Too much time to spend being it, as well.
We know that. We know — we think — better
than to let it get us down.
But loss is loss.
And I don’t care what folks say — time does not
heal all wounds.
Two years is not nearly enough time to make
sense of much of anything.


Three years later, aren’t we all
feeling foolish and a little self-indulgent, still
smarting from time’s lash…
Those who grieve hard — still — cannot help but
wish their pain will last
as long as they breathe, the measure
of their anguish
being the measure of their devotion
to their long-lost loved one’s memory. To pry
their grieving grasp from around their treasured memories, to try
to talk them into trading tear-soaked-soggy sack-
cloth and ashes for a comfortable house dress… Well,
that would be
just plain cruel.


Four years after that terrible, terrible
weekend/week/evening/event, some
still ache as though it happened yesterday, and they
cannot help but
suspect
those who claim to have moved
on…

and in the middle
stand
the ones who can see
both sides…

they’re the ones who hurt either half
or twice
as much, depending
on the movements of the moon
and the configuration of the seasonal sunlight
on scenes once shared with the one
who’s passed.

Grief is not like an autumn leaf suc-
cumbing to persistent elements.
It is a season, in itself.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Kay Stoner, All Rights Reserved