IT'S DARK IN HERE...

 It's Dark in Here

I am writing these poems
From inside a lion,
And it's rather dark in here.
So please excuse the handwriting
Which may not be too clear.
But this afternoon by the lion's cage
I'm afraid I got too near.
And I'm writing these lines
From inside a lion,
And it's rather dark in here.

This funny poem by Shel Silverstein  which I came 

upon this morning in a  pile of notes and clippings  over

 a decade old was in the printing hand of my grand-daughter. 

she had mailed  it to me when she was  about 8 years old.

 She also added her own drawing of a hand with a pen emerging

 from the mouth of a big crouching cat. Even  now I am struck

 by her appreciation of  humor and poetry on full display here.

 And also I have come  to think that  this little rhyme is more 

accurate and  more serious about the  vocation  of the poet

 than  it may seem on first reading. It could be the prologue

 for almost every book of  poetry.

  Poets do often  feel that they are  writing in the dark

 and that is a scary place to be.  

 Also  many  know the creeping unease  of being in a dangerous

place; that sense of how unwelcome are the insights of poets  who

 write  from the heart of a repressive society.  Knowing vaguely

that  we are in a place that could easily devour us if it even

condescended to notice us.

The poet makes constant and unsuccessful raids on

 the inarticulate as TS Eliot described:

 And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—

ENOUGH SAID 

MARGARET ARE YOU GRIEVING?

Márgarét, áre you gríeving 

Over Goldengrove unleaving? 

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? 

Ah! ás the heart grows older 

It will come to such sights colder 

By and by, nor spare a sigh 

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; 

And yet you wíll weep and know why. 

Now no matter, child, the name: 

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same. 

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed 

What heart heard of, ghost guessed: 

It ís the blight man was born for, 

It is Margaret you mourn for. 

Gerard Manly Hopkins' poem about  the springs of sorrow that all humanity shares was  one of my mother's favorites because it was addressed to a child who was also named Margaret.  She took it personally and often recited  lines aloud. I now understand that maybe she did this when she was sad and tempted to express her sadness by weeping.  I, on the  other hand, cried loudly and often as a child-- and  sometimes still do. 

"No use crying over spilt milk," she would say.  And there is some truth in that proverb--but like many things it is not an absolute.  There is some use to crying--no,it does not bring the milk back into the glass, but it does express dismay and sometimes remorse.

Reading  the  Gospels and epistles for this Holy  Week I am struck  by the   admonition to Peter  when  Jesus foretells that  he  will  deny  his Master three times.  Even though he  protests that he will die with him, Peter does just that later that night in the courtyard where he watches as the torture of Jesus gets underway.  He lies and says that he  was never with him and does not know him. And after the third  lying denial, he hears the cock crow and he looks towards Jesus and Jesus returns the look with  what must be such  all-embracing  love and mercy that Peter  stumbles out of the courtyard and weeps.

Yes, Peter weeps and  that is all he does that night, and so  does Jesus weep over the death of his dear friend Lazarus, and we are told that he weeps over Jerusalem. And if we weep when we  read or see on TV stories of people dying--like those  young people  from Parkland who tell of  their classmates who died. Or the story in  today's news paper of a ten year old  child  who wept as her father  tortured her with  whippings and forced squatting and feeding.  Or the story of the  children in Siberia who  left messages  for their  parents from the  raging inferno of a mall where they were trapped  by flames.

  All of these  horrors make us weep and make heaven weep. But our weeping must stop as Peter's stopped  when he wept but unlike Judas did not  kill himself, When we weep, we  must also   work for an end to our weeping.  

We take up the task of adding to the justice and mercy in the world when we see that we  who weep and care must also be the ones who organize and agitate  for change.