Tuesday
Because the news is so dark these days, here’s a Jane Kenyon poem that may pick you up. Gazing at the evening sun as the world prepares to sink into night, the poet flashes back to a childhood memory. At this moment between light and dark, she remembers an ecstatic moment when, wearing a yellow dress, she made a perfect circle as she whirled around in “the ochre light of an early June evening.”
And even though she was a child, she sensed that she would need to hold on to this memory in order “to live and to go on living” when sorrows beset her. Kenyon certainly faced such sorrows, wrestling with depression and then dying of leukemia at 47. Yet the poem declares that, in that ecstatic moment, she grasped that sorrow would never “consume my heart.” She grasped this truth even as it was happening:
Evening Sun
Jane Kenyon
Why does this light force me back
to my childhood? I wore a yellow
summer dress and the skirt
made a perfect circle.
Turning and turning
until it flared to the limit
was irresistible….The grass and trees,
my outstretched arms and the skirt
whirled in the ochre light
of an early June evening.
And I knew then
that I would have to live,
and go on living: what sorrow it was;
and still what sorrow ignites
but does not consume
my heart
The poem, written in 1983, reminds me of a Lucille Clifton poem written a decade later. In Clifton’s case, an elusive sun once more plays a supporting role, helping her recover from the trauma of sexual child abuse at the hands of her father. Only after he died, she writes, did she remember how one can catch a glimpse of the sun even in darkness. “Only then,” she writes,
did i remember how she [the moon]
catches the sun and keeps most of him
for the evening that surely will come;
and it comes.
only then did i know that to live
in the world all that i needed was
some small light and know that indeed
i would rise again and rise again to dance.
Although the evening invariably comes, the heart doesn’t have to surrender to it.