Tag Archives: life

Last day

Posted on by

She held him, not trusting him to find the chair.

“We’re family,” she said. “Like family.

You don’t remember?”

He shook his head.

“You’ve come to our house for thirty years.”

He shrugged sorry.

“I have to go with him.”

He knew him, but not his name.

And later, after the coffee, he went.

For when he was young he could go where he liked.

But now was time for where he’d rather not go.

 

R.I.P. Fr. Piet van der Pol S.S.S. (D. 19 February 2017).

Your granddaughter, your namesake

Posted on by

You were in your last days

and you’d open your eyes

and say you were tired.

We said, Sleep, and

We’re going for a walk.

I didn’t like that it was wet in the woods,

but there were acorns,

and that, she said, was what you did together –

make dolls of them, and sew.

Once she made pants. When she

thought she was, she said, I’m done,

but you said no.

You pulled stitches and fixed the seam.

You wouldn’t stop till you got it right.

Which is what you’re doing now, she said:

piecing the past and pulling tight the seam.

Beatitude

Posted on by

I thought I was supposed to

do something big,

but it kept never happening

and I felt really small.

My heart became a sad, little

shrinking thing, and if you took me

whole and entire, I’d have fit through

the hole of a salt shaker.

The crystals were like boulders to me.

The worst of it was

I knew it was good to be little

and so I felt I

had no right to be sad.

I was selling the message of

poor in the Spirit, and believed it too,

so why was I sad? I knew big

would do nothing for me.

Thank God I wasn’t always sad.

Joy stole up like a teasing child.

Play a game. Look at my kaleidoscope.

I didn’t have the heart to shoo her away.

All she had to do was move a single cloud

and the whole world looked different.

When she left, though, to play with her ocean,

I’d put all the clouds back in place.

And it stayed that way, my face

fixed in a wrinkle, and it

stayed that way

until one day I saw

what the problem was.

I was trying to be big by being

a prophet of the little,

but forgot to be, really be, little,

a man at home in his own wooly heart,

working in sleet and sun and stain,

ready to live life alive again.

A man in a hat. A man with a rake.

A man whom happiness would not forsake

at the drop of a hat.

So now I’m off to do that job –

to work for free in God’s own yard.

God will rain and God will blow,

and I’ll rake His leaves and shovel His snow.

And smile as I do, for the little I know.

How in heaven the old

Posted on by

How in heaven the old appears first

for the sake of recognition –

your gaunt frame and thinning hair,

the soft blue veins on the back of your hand.

We’ll need to be sure.

We’ll have to hear the little cough in your throat first,

before we’ll know we’re there.