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Sunday
This past May journalist Josie Glausius wrote about how she turned to poetry when her 12-year-old son was dying of a rare form of brain cancer. The poem that meant the most to her was one that alludes to one of next Sunday’s Old Testament readings, the one about infant Moses in the river.
Before turning to it, here are some other ways poetry served her. She reports that she read him poems her mother had read to her as a child, including Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29” (“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”) and John Masefield’s “Cargoes.” She says her son listened “rapt and smiling,” after which they would talk about the meaning of the poems.
I love these choices. With the Shakespeare sonnet I can imagine her son feeling sorry for himself (“I all alone beweep my outcast state”) but then moving on to a more positive vision:
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
The Masefield poem, meanwhile, would have helped him imagine his unknown journey as sailing to exotic lands with strange-sounding names. It would have appealed to his vision of adventure, which was also the reason why he liked Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” which his mother recited to him in his final hours when he was lying unconscious. She explains what the poem had meant to him:
My son had learned the words to Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem by listening to me recite it to him and his twin sister at bedtime. A brave, bright, imaginative, optimistic boy, he loved the drama of the poem and the courage of the “beamish boy” as, with his “vorpal sword” in hand, he defeats his “manxome foe.”
During the illness, Glausius started a poetry group on WhatsApp, which she called “Poetry Is Medicine.” As she had discovered during earlier crises, “the rhythm of poetry can soothe my anxieties. With just a word or a phrase, a poem can reach the hidden places that prayers or well-meaning advice cannot.”
Her friends in the group responded by sending her poems that reached deep:
One sent “Chinese Foot Chart,” by Kay Ryan: (“Look, / boats of mercy / embark from / our heart at the / oddest knock.”). Another carefully translated the Hebrew poem “Apple of Imperfection,” by Varda Genossar: “First speech is the speech of love … last speech, silence.”
After her son died, there were yet other poems. One friend sent her Raymond Carver’s “Late Fragment,” his last published poem:
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
The poem “offered me some small comfort,” Glausius wrote, “because I knew that even in my son’s darkest hours, he was always loved — and still is — and was never for a moment alone.”
Another friend sent her Calista Buchen’s “Taking Care”:
I sit with my grief. I mother it. I hold its small, hot hand. I don’t say, shhh. I don’t say, its okay. I wait until it is done having feelings. Then we stand and we go wash the dishes. We crack open bedroom doors, step over the creaks, and kiss the children. We are sore from this grief, like we’ve returned from a run, like we are training for a marathon. I’m with you all the way, says my grief, whispering, and then we splash our face with water and stretch, one big shadow and one small.
And then there was Carl Sandburg’s “Theme in Yellow,” which she appreciated because the title “contains my son’s favorite, ‘cheerful’ color.” She particularly liked the passage,
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
But the poem that reached the deepest was about infant Moses. Here’s the relevant section from the Biblical story:
When she could hide him no longer she got a papyrus basket for him, and plastered it with bitumen and pitch; she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river. His sister stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him.
The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him…
Glausius says she read Spanish poet Luis Alberto de Cuenca’s “Moses” (trans. Gustavo Pérez Firmat) by her son’s grave eight days after his death. Like some of the other poems that consoled her and her son in his final months, it imagines death as a journey. Along with the basket story, in also alludes to the parting of the Red Sea and other divine interventions:
Give me your hand. We have to cross
the river and my strength fails me.
Hold me as if I were an abandoned package
in a wicker basket, a lump that moves
and cries in the twilight. Cross the river
with me. Even if this time the waters
don’t part before us. Even if this time God
doesn’t come to our aid and a flurry of arrows
riddles our backs. Even if there is no river.
I love how we’re uncertain whom the poem addresses. When Glausius read the poem at the graveside service, was she asking for God’s help while imagining herself, like her son when he was a baby, as a “lump that moves and cries in the twilight.” The river in this case would be her son’s death, which she doesn’t want to turn away from–and which God has not forestalled by divine intervention.
Or did she see herself asking her son to give her strength, the parent-child relationship momentarily reversed? It could be that she’s asking him to help her stay upright at the moment when her strength fails her.
The power that lies in making such a request is that one feels less alone. One imagines that someone is listening and reaching out a hand.