A Word of Farewell

    In early September, at the end of a long, busy summer, I learned that my long-time friend, colleague, and fellow writer Jack Leax had died. 

    Jack touched many lives through his 40 years of teaching and in his local community ~ and many more through his many books. Jack and our Department Chair, Charles, were the first Houghton folks I met; they ferried me from the airport in Rochester down into the hills and cornfields and dairy land of our little village when I was a candidate for the teaching post I held for 35 years. That was in May of 1984. Jack was already well known, both locally and within the communities of Christian writers. 

    "Christian writer" is not a term either of us chose or liked; our preferred point of identification was, simply, "writer." As it happened, we are also poets, so that term works as well. By personal conviction and belief, we are both Christian. Jack's publications, contacts, and readership were widely known among these folks. Mine weren't. My publications were many fewer and scattered around. But this aversion to limiting one's identification as a writer to one modifier was just one of many characteristics we shared.

    Jack did many things to spread his largess around; I will mention a few that directly benefited me. 

    Bringing William Stafford to campus, one of many writers Jack brought in to work with students or to give readings, continues to be a significant touchstone from my first years in Houghton. I had known of William Stafford before he came to campus. What Stafford had to offer as a poet, teacher, human being, and moral guidepost requires its own long, long discussion; but let me simply note that Stafford's presence was as a fellow traveler. He had no use for the competitiveness and celebrity so common among writers then -- and now. Jack, naturally, understood the kinship.

    After his retirement, Jack and Linda Mills-Woolsey, an extremely talented colleague/poet/writer, and I met to read and discuss our work-in-progress. For a time, our meetings were fairly frequent, but gradually they became sporadic as our schedules involved other demands, many of them medical appointments and care responsibilities. This small, last community of poets was energizing and instructive for all of us.

    As our teaching careers grew long and prospects of retirement loomed closer, Jack and I had many discussions about what we called "the end game." Jack was very intentional about this stage of life events as he was about everything else related to his teaching and writing. I have been less intentional, preferring to stay in the moment, usually. Still, we observed and discussed how various colleagues exited teaching and how various writers "stopped" producing. For the observant, there are many cautionary stories out there and a few, many fewer, instructive ones.

    I don't know whether Jack was happy with how his retirement plan worked out, but I know he stayed engaged and kept writing until at the very, very end he couldn't.

    Bringing Sally Craft of Wordfarm, then a fairly new literary publisher, to campus, was another gift from Jack. During her short stay, at Jack's suggestion and with his encouragement, I gave her my manuscript for Living on the Flood Plain. She read it over-night and told me in the morning that Wordfarm would like to publish it. That encouragement, decision, and resulting publication were life-changing for the writer in me.

    Assessing Jack's legacy and impact will require more time and many more voices.

    Still, as one of those voices, I am enormously grateful to have known and worked along side Jack Leax for nearly forty years. Thank you, Jack. We shall meet again on that other shore, on that great gettin' up morning. 

   

A Parable for our Time

     As I was entering the last of my 45 years of teaching, 35 at the small Christian liberal arts college I retired from, I was asked to bring devotions at one of our regular faculty meeting sessions early in February. This was an opportunity afforded me several times over the years despite my infrequent attendance at these meetings.

    My decision to retire would come some months later, but as I  considered what I would offer to my colleagues at the very beginning of a new semester, when students and teachers alike were full of energy and optimism for what lay ahead, I thought to get as close as I could to the heart of our responsibility. It was a message for the beginning of things, a "mash-up" of familiar passages from the Sermon on the Mount. Although as I rediscovered this piece some years later in retirement, it spoke to me about the broader urgencies of our present social, political, cultural moment. It is, you might say, an exhortation for "the adults in the room."

 

A Meditation and Exhortation in Story Form 

       Seeing that many came to Him to be taught year after year, the TEACHER climbed the steps of a campus building where everyone could see Him. And when He had seated Himself, all His students – young and old, those with wide experience and those with none – all who had come to hear what He would tell them -- pressed in around Him.

     And he spoke to them, saying: “Blessed are the humble. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are the peacemakers.”

     “Teacher!” someone interrupted, “What shall we do to inherit eternal life?”

     Smiling despite the off-topic interruption, the Teacher answered, “What is written in the law? How do you read it?”

     Several young voices answered at once, for they were used to speaking directly, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and [likewise, you shall love] your neighbor as yourself.”

     So the Teacher assured them, “You have answered correctly. You have mastered the material; surely you will pass the examinations. Now do these things, and you will live.”

     “Teacher!” called another, who perhaps already knew the answer to his question but wanted to look good, “Just who is my neighbor?”

     So the Teacher, understanding the moment and patient as always, told a story, and you know that story by heart. It had robbers and thieves and a crucial life-saving act of kindness that exceeded all duty and expectations. There was blood, and dirt, and blunt weapons, and a general thrashing about; but there was also a foreigner who was not offended by the great task of compassion.

     Then the Teacher asked, “Who proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among thieves?”

     “The one who showed mercy,” offered a young woman to a murmur of general approval.

     The Teacher looked at them in the eyes as if individually and said quietly, “You go and do likewise.”

     Then he added as if he expected objections and resistance and general complaining, “Love your enemies. And pray for those who treat you badly. By these things you will find harmony with our God who rules from above, for the sovereign God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”

     Here the Teacher paused to catch His breath as if from great exertion, as if he himself had lifted the wounded man onto his pack animal and carried him down into the village. Then, He added, as if He imagined His story might be mistakenly used as an excuse for ignoring the rule of law and the traditions of the church, “Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”

     They were silent for a moment while the great wheels of logic and introspection and objection ground away in their heads.

     In this silence, the Teacher continued His original line of discourse,

     “Blessed are the pure in heart. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Bless are those whose appetites are for righteousness.”

     “Teacher!” a voice from the back interrupted again, “What shall we do to inherit eternal life? Give us something concrete to work with. Give us a three step or a four step plan. We are afraid of the ambiguities of evil on the one hand and of the sharp edges of the law on the other.”

     The Teacher answered, “Here is something concrete: Give to the one who begs from you. Do not refuse the one who would borrow from you. To feed the hungry, to cloth the naked, to shelter the dispossessed is to feed me, to dress me, to shelter me.”

     “Teacher!” came a puzzled voice from those crowded to the front, “How can this be? When did we see you hungry or thirsty or sick or in prison or wandering about in need of shelter?” 

     The Teacher, growing weary perhaps of the need to clarify and reiterate, said, “Even as you attended to the least of these – my brothers, my sisters, my children, my wounded and infirm, my wanderers and strangers and aliens – even as you got up from your easy chairs and down from your podiums and tended to this great human diaspora that are the Children of God, you have ministered to me.”

     Then the Teacher, indignant at their willful blindness, raised his hand as if to point to each soul and said, “Be careful of hypocrisy. Do not shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in anyone’s face. Let the children come to me in all their simplicity and childishness. Do not raise false obstacles. Do not be an obstacle yourself.”

     When He had spoken these words, the Teacher stopped. There was silence again as though a great wind had passed by. In that silence, He spoke again of healing, words to console and to motivate.

     “You know already how to follow the law: you tithe, for example, accounting even for pennies and minutes. But in your compulsion to obey these small stipulations, do not neglect the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.

     “You are not my sword of judgment and vengeance. On the contrary, you are the salt of the earth. You are the light of world.”

     Lowering his voice and looking directly to his followers, judging perhaps that the teaching moment was at hand, he charged those pressed close to him, “Turn again to the young who have gathered; they are in your care. Be my voice, yes; speak my words.  But be also my hands. Be my heart.”

     We who have eyes to see and ears to discern, let us attend to what the Teacher has spoken.

 

Mending Fences, Pt 2: Frost Heaves

[Part II: Frost Heaves, a Coda, if you will, to the February 23, 2024 post on the human costs of building walls.]
 

      It would be unfair to leave my parsing of "Mending Wall" (in my February 23rd post) without giving a bit more voice to a few elements that shed additional light on Robert Frost's thinking, his philosophical leanings, and his superb craftsmanship. The appearance of narrative and descriptive simplicity in "Mending Wall" is a Frost trademark; that is a primary reason we all find his poems so attractive. But that very simplicity embodies a more complex, nuanced set of attitudes and ideas. Frost as "frost heave" -- personal belief as 'force of nature' -- is just one example of Frost's layered technique.

    It's easy enough to note that "good fences make good neighbors." Often quoted, this sentiment is both a traditional cliche that smacks of medieval thinking and an unexamined home-grown proverb. We might think it is the notion we are expected to embrace because it is up-front, straightforward, and plain-spoken at the end of the poem. It is,  to use a modern figure of speech, the "take away."

    Well, yes and no. Noting Frost's low opinion of walls takes the idea one step further, the notion enhanced by his descriptive language regarding his stone-age neighbor who resolutely embraces the fence/good neighbor ideal. That was the gist of my last post.

 

    If we understand Frost's opposition to fences making good neighbors, we ought to be surprised by his, or the narrator's, participation in the annual ritual of rebuilding the wall. Since neither neighbor needs the wall for land or crop protection and since neither needs the wall as a repository for stones pulled from fields being prepared for crops, the exercise of setting tumbled rocks back onto the rock wall has no immediate agricultural, privacy, or security function. 

    Frost is right, the wall is not necessary between civilized people living next to each other. Civilized neighbors don't need walls.

    What the annual rebuilding of the stone walls does require, oddly enough, is cooperation, a willingness to compromise, and an understanding of working together. Good fences that bring us together to work in peace toward a common goal, shared labor, and maintaining a land feature that enhances both domains. In other words, it is an activity that benefits both while costing little more than a few hours, a bit of labor, some wear and tear on the hands, and a desire to keep the peace. 

     I won't push this notion far enough to suggest that Frost had Christian leanings, but I will argue that the narrator in "Mending Wall" was acting under the broadly understood Christian principle of "love your neighbor as yourself." 

 

    Frost's wall -- in this instance not a wall built out of fear nor out of a misplaced sense of political expedience -- constitutes a shared wall, restored for the common good through common labor and a spirit of good will. A wall meant to bridge, if you will, to unify rather than to divide. A wall that allows both neighbors to maintain their identities, even as they remain congenial with one another. Now that, I would argue, is an extraordinary example of how we might find common cause in an age characterized by rigidity, misplaced virtue, orchestrated fear, and, frankly, arrogance.

Building Walls, Mending Fences, Engaging Force Fields

                

        Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

        That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

        And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

        And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

      I am embarrassed to admit that I have not always understood the first lines of Robert Frost's familiar poem "Mending Wall" to embody a joke of sorts. After all, despite the initial general reference to "something," the poem does provide a number of plausible answers for the question "why walls tend to fall down?"  "Something" is not terribly useful in helping us understand what might be behind the "frozen-ground-swell[s]" that are responsible. But perhaps we'll find satisfactory explanation before the poem ends.

    "Mending Wall," of course, concerns free-standing stone fences erected years and years ago by New England farmers to clear their fields of rocks. Few things make plowing and planting as difficult as rocky soil. As a teenager during my summer job as farm labor, I spent many hours "picking rocks" out of fields that we had "harvested" rocks from just the summer before. We threw our potato sized rocks into the bucket of a front-end loader before dumping the bucket in piles just off the field.

    Today, we think of those walls built before our time as decorative rather than functional, so this poem, which dates from 1914, is instructional as to how farmers might have regarded their stone walls and the work needed to keep them in place. We can all grasp the practical solution of replacing stones that have fallen during the winter.

    Other cultures have used walls to achieve particular ends, often as fortification walls. We visited walls along the mountain tops above the Korean port of Busan, built in older times as a bulwark against invaders from the sea. Korea faced frequent attempts to invade their peninsula both from China via the mainland, and from Japan, among others, from the sea. The wall could be manned by soldiers or watchmen, ships could be identified as trading vessels or as foreign invaders before they reached the harbor, and signal fires could be lit to send an alarm quickly from watchtower to watchtower.

    Our word "fortification" is often code language for keeping the barbarians at bay. "Barbarian" itself is code for many other undesirable things beginning with "foreign," "alien," "other," "not us." While we don't always take this coded language further, what the words clearly imply are things like murder, rape, pillage, destruction, loss of what is ours. Those "protected" by the wall also see it as a means of securing identity and, perhaps, of controlling the population or regulating trade.

    It is easy to think here of some famous walls from antiquity built to serve these functions. Hadrian's Wall, which runs east and west across northern England, is one. Remnants of that wall are a special attraction these days, especially for those interested in Roman ruins. The Romans built great walls. And roadways. And baths. We might have ventured further north to see a part of Hadrian's Wall this last September while visiting in Chester -- had I not gotten sick. 

    The Great Wall of China, which dwarfs Hadrian's Wall in every way, is another famous "security" wall of ancient construction. We have not seen the Great Wall on our visits to China, but we were able to walk along side of a small scale-model of that wall at an outdoor theme park in Shenzhen called "Splendid China." This miniature was built with meticulous care and precision.

    It's not the same experience, of course; but with a little imagination one can get a feel for what the Great Wall entails. The actual Great Wall is visible from space, after all. In addition to the usual reasons regarding barbarians, the Great Wall was also built as a way of hemming in various tribal and ethnic regions to create one "unified" China. The "one China" effort we see today has ancient roots in Chinese history. What struck me in visiting this scale model -- and what has struck me in other places we have visited with architectural and artistic "ruins" -- was the cost of these projects in terms of human lives.

    These costs are not part of the PR associated with the tourist experience but one can easily find educated estimates of lives lost during construction. In a quick check regarding number of deaths attributed to building the Great Wall, I kept finding 400,000 popping up in numerous sources, although, of course, it is impossible to get a finely calibrated death toll.

    Although they are not walls, many of the famous ancient monuments we saw in Egypt or the fairly recently discovered clay soldier excavations at Xi'an, China, are testament not just to human ingenuity and engineering brilliance, but also to servitude, suffering, and loss of life. It would seem to be a human tendency to look away from human costs in favor of the bright and impressive objects.

    The human cost of building, maintaining, and staffing walls with soldiers, watchmen, messengers, trades people and suppliers of all sorts has always proven enormous -- even when the construction itself performs as intended, which, I would argue, is rarely the case. At least they do not appear to perform well for long. "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."

    Another trait many of these walls and ruins share with each other is that they were constructed under authoritarian rule. There may be rare exceptions to this generalization, but I don't know of too many. Even the "necessary" wall above Busan was likely built with conscripted labor. The lives of those pressed into labor were not often much different from the day-to-day lives of those who lived within the wall's protection except for the shortened life-expectancy of laborers. This fact in itself would suggest a causal rather than a coincidental link between authoritarianism and the compulsion to build walls.

    In recent years, perhaps because we know more about them, barrier walls have a rather more complicated track record. The "wall of separation" put up by Israel in the West Bank to hinder Palestinian suicide attacks seems to have worked for that specific problem; the wall of separation has, in fact, seriously reduced the number of suicide bombers. And we know that Israel operates as a democracy not an autocracy, although the wall has been controversial.

    Still, one would be remiss to regard even this wall as a permanent solution because one consequence of the wall is that Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis are no longer able to know each other. The wall sunders daily interactions; it negates community. Citizens on both sides of the wall no longer know each other well. This actualized appeal to separation leads to ignorance, ignorance to suspicion, suspicion to falsehood and fear, fear to grievance, violence, and calls for vengeance. 

     Think October 7th at the southern border as, perhaps, an unintended consequence.

    Other "security" walls built within my lifetime would include the Berlin wall. A particularly notorious part of the "iron curtain," the Berlin Wall was an attempt to keep some Germans out of East Berlin and other Germans in. The Berlin wall was famously opposed by American Presidents of both parties, namely, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. This wall, built of cinder block, topped with razor wire, and bordered by kill zones, was simply a hard manifestation of the hard borders we associate with the Soviet Union. Same intentions, same functions, same infliction of lethal punishment on those within and without who dared cross it.

    If you are thinking that the iron curtain also has more than a passing resemblance to the much-called-for tall steel border wall along the Rio Grande, you are right. Envisioned by some as "security" for those of us privileged enough to live north of our southern border, it can have a visceral appeal. Thinking that such a wall will protect us, however, is simply wrong. Protection is not that singular nor that simple. The problems that need fixing are much larger and more complex than "great wall" can accommodate. 

    "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," the poet wrote. I understand the poem, mostly, but I missed the joke. More recently, I got it. The joke. The statement. The alignment. The "frost" pun as personal statement. The joke in those lines is that the "Something" is "frost," as in Frost himself, a force of enlightened thinking and a force of Nature. It's not really funny, but it is telling.

    If you are in doubt as to the force of the narrative, you might find it illuminating to read the end of "Mending Wall," noting especially how Frost characterizes the neighbor who keeps insisting that the wall be rebuilt every spring.                                       

                                            I see him there 

        Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

        In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

        He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

        Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

        He will not go behind his father’s saying,

        And he likes having thought of it so well

        He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

After all, it's a small world

    We did not visit the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) along the 38th Parallel during our five months in Korea in 2011, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that tours were taking tourists far enough north to "see" into North Korea. We had opportunities, I suppose; several times we traveled to Seoul from our community in Busan on the KTX. We might have ventured further, but neither of us felt lured by the opportunity to view forbidden land to the north. And the idea that a buffer zone between warring countries could be viewed as a form of entertainment was unsettling.

    Busan, where we were living in a graduate student dorm, lies within the Pusan Perimeter, which was the small corner of the Korean Peninsula around the port of Pusan not overrun by the North during the 1950-53 hot war. Among other things, Busan (then Pusan) was the seat of the ROK Provisional Government, backed by the UN. The government returned to Seoul once it was following General Douglas McArthur's famously risky and famously successful sea landing at Incheon. That was September 15, 1950.

 

     During our all-too-brief residence in Korea, our interest both in my teaching assignment and with our living situation was to live and work among Koreans. This meant, of course, that we were able to see, hear, and rub shoulders with more Koreans -- to be Korean as much as possible. We had specifically requested we not be put in an American compound.

    We were only in country about five months, but our observations during that time confirmed over and over that during the 1950-53 war in Korea everyone suffered. Even those who never left Pusan or who had fled to the relatively protected area around Pusan itself suffered unimaginably.

    It is interesting to me that all the stories I have read about that period, especially those written by Koreans, speak to the overwhelming fear, deprivation, uncertainty, unnecessary loss of life, and stress all Koreans experienced. My first Korean "war novel" was Wan-Suh Park's Who Ate Up all the Shinga? While"shinga" a "survival food" (think, perhaps, dandelion greens) that ordinary people might forage, Park's novel describes the unrelenting horrors and losses experienced by one family, caught as they were between armies from the North and armies from the South. It is a heartbreaking read.

    The Korean University students I taught were unwilling on the whole to write about this period of war. Many had been shielded from its horrors to the point of ignorance; most just wanted to leave the past alone. I understand that reluctance. Nevertheless, some were forthcoming when asked to describe their grandparents' lives, especially in terms of how grandparents' lives differed from their own. I can't begin to catalog the varieties of hardship, violence, oppression, deprivation, and suffering that surfaced in these stories. In some cases the grandparents had long ago gone silent, taking their horrors with them. 

    I have no personal experience that even remotely compares, yet my heart was and is battered over and over again. How could it not be so?

    Other countries I have lived in or visited -- China, Russia, Egypt, France, the UK, even my own country, the US -- bear the scars of war in visible ways. I have visited battlefields and memorials. I have read accounts. I have seen photographs. I have friends whose lives have been damaged by combat in wars during my own lifetime. I have pieced together comments and observations from many sources. Sometimes there is chest-thumping and the self-congratulation.  Official histories can read that way; the old adage that victors write the histories is true enough. Sometimes, the accounts call for vengeance; they-did-it-first finger-pointing, calls for retaliation and retribution frequently underlay these arguments instead of clear-eyed reasoning. Truth-telling, capital "T" Truth, is usually a first casualty.

    While it may be true that some few wars are actually necessary, the UN defense of South Korea being one perhaps, no war is a good war, a clean war. We visited the UN Cemetery in Busan while we were there. Twice, in fact. It had the same sobering, heart-wrenching effect on me as our visit to the American Cemetery in Normandy in October 2018.

 

 

 

    Objectively, all wars produce a common set of facts: soldiers die, civilians die, babies and old people die, cities are destroyed, lives are ruined, traditions and ways of life are obliterated, farmland is rendered toxic with landmines and other residue from the war effort. And everyone, civilians especially, pays an extraordinary price in suffering.

    All of my observations lead me to this question: If war is so universally reprehensible and its punishments so widely catastrophic, why is the alternative, peace, such a hard idea to grasp? 

    This is not a moment for finger pointing nor for posturing -- neither will bring an end to killing and suffering. To state it differently, does it really surprise anyone that the current war in the middle east is intractable if the starting point for both sides is annihilation of the other? The same question can be asked of other violent conflicts, as even partisans should know. Surely, there is enough blame to go around to account for the present state of our troubled world. None of us can claim absolutely to have clean hands.  

    Isn't our troubled world the same world mentioned in the first phrase of John 3:16 -- this world that God loved so, so much that he intervened in human history? Why is it so hard to understand that strength, power -- whatever its forms -- comes with enormous responsibilities? Or that peace require we step into the breach, as it were -- that we become agents of peace?

    Why do we find it easier to build bunkers and shroud them with barbed wire to protect our "security" than to put on kindness, generosity, compassion, understanding -- to allow ourselves to be vulnerable for the sake of the common good? Why do we frame our positions in terms of abstractions and absolutes, ensuring war remains inevitable and intractable?

    For those of us who identify as Christian: why do we insist on practicing our faith selectively? Why do we pick and choose from Scripture what seems to support our position, especially in the political arena, and ignore the weightier matters of mercy and justice and faithfulness? Why are we so quick to draw an absolute line between I and we? between us and them? 

    Unless we value ceremonies in the military cemeteries over lives of preventable suffering in our own time, we need to take responsibility. We who so eagerly and quickly embrace grace for ourselves are called out when we cruelly deny it to others. If we excuse that behavior, shame on us. Shame on me. Shame on you. Shame on all of us.

  

A New Year's Tale

 

So it was

on that long journey into childhood,

when few moments had accumulated

in Memory and fewer still as Family History,

before special days became Traditions,

the first Christmas I remember 

began in a snowdrift east of Cheyenne.

My father's truck stuck fast near the cattle gate

at the turn-in

to one straight mile of dirt road

leading to my grandfather's church

and the four room parsonage

miles from any ranch house.

Already bundled for cold, my brothers and I

pushed back the canvas door of Dad's homemade canopy,

climbed out of the truck bed to breathe air

untainted by exhaust. 

We leaned against the wind-driven snow,

scarves tightened over our noses, and

headed down the road toward parsonage lights

my parents assured us

they could see -- a family of pilgrims,

refugees, seekers of safe harbor in the storm -- 

Dad, Mom, the youngest brother carried,

we three older boys

-- all huddling as much as trudging allowed in a blizzard

-- all hoping the lantern in the truck bed would burn

long enough to save the television

with its huge cabinet, to keep

its tubes, its tiny screen from freezing in the arctic night.

And then we were welcomed in,

warming under blankets on the living room floor.

And the small blue pilot light of the gas furnace

that was the star of our arrival

became morning sun,

and my father and grandfather

were settling the television console into a corner,

our truck miraculously in the yard,

the night journey already lost

to the harrowing snows of yesterday.

And I sat up in my travel clothes to air 

full of women's voices and festive cooking in the kitchen.

And then it was, as it would be always from that day,

a real Christmas and the promised New Year.

 

 

A Christmas List

     Once upon a time, lists were a different thing. My mom always kept a grocery list, of course, but I am referring to a different kind of list. During my long ago childhood, which is to say, during the 1950s, I might have been asked what I wanted for Christmas. It was an adult question of the "what do you want to be when you grow up" sort. I just don't remember being asked. And a child who drew up a list 'for Santa' was a bit of a dreamer, at least in our house.

    Still, one year I received an ill-fitting football uniform that I must have begged desperately for. I may have worn the uniform once or twice for the front yard tackle football games we played, my brothers and I and neighborhood boys. Another year I got cowboy boots -- we lived in Wyoming, after all, within earshot of the stadium where Josh Allen played quarterback for Wyoming Cowboys many decades later. I liked the cowboy boots and wore them, although clearly I would have wanted higher heels rather than the flat boots my parents chose.

    "Wish Lists," "bucket lists," and on-line "registries" were far in the future. When I was growing up, grown-ups mostly thought in terms of "what does he need?" At least if one judges by the presents themselves -- socks, pajamas, 3-in-a-pack tidy whities, a white shirt for Sunday -- need  is what pulled the Christmas gift wagon. 

    So, back in the day, as we say now, when I was a young man with a young family and a new career as a teacher and maybe also great literary ambitions -- at a time when I could, in fact, and sometimes did burn the candle at both ends -- I wrote a poem called "Christmas List." Like the poem in my Christmas post, this poem has one foot on the stony path of every day life; but most of the weight here is on the other foot, the one treading the larger realm of universals.

    I won't assume, dear reader, that you need to have the poem explained. Nevertheless, on the other side of the poem I will point out things that might shed light on my 'list'.

 

Christmas List

 

A knife for salvation

A book for its doors

A voice or a fence for freedom

    either will do

Mice for comfort

A clock for anxiety

A pen, a pen to live by

Hands to shape the air

Window casings to sing in the freshening wind

A moment, a chair

& light

Yes, a little circle of light

    Odd as it may appear on first reading, this poem is special to me. It does a lot of work, one might say. As the last poem in Simple Clutter  it brings a note of redemption to a book that grows dark near its end, not all that different from the dark days of December at year's end. "Light" is the last word of this last poem; "a little circle of light" is the last, and "telling," phrase. The real life bones of the book -- its skeleton, if you will -- "a book," "a voice," "a pen," "a moment," "a chair/ & light" -- are my tools; they are what a writer needs to work. 

    This noting of 'bones' references my own daily occupation with writing, but it is hardly a stretch to identify them as devotion as well. "A clock," which for the writer is also both time for the task at hand and a deadline, may also be one of those bones. Setting aside the "knife" and "mice' references for a broader discussion, the other, less direct elements might be understood as constraints, obstacles, limitations, and maybe inspiration, or even as process.

    We are working in the margins here, I know. But let the ideas sink in for a moment; poems are inherently an argument to slow down and to pay attention. The last line, already mentioned as providing a note of redemption is more than just the light that drops from a small work lamp onto a page one is laboring over. It is more than habitual acts of devotion. One might also think of it as illumination, insight, which appears to push aside the darkness that so quickly and easily characterizes our lives.

    If we follow out these ideas, as I am hoping we will, the poem as a "list" of what is hoped for constitutes a prayer for the handful of things necessary to enable the many layered life one, me in particular, may desire. These are not the cowboy boots with the low heels or the ill-fitting uniform that somehow appeared on my childhood "wish list," had I known such a thing.

 

    Though of far less magnitude, the possibilities of the last phrase are akin to the request Solomon of God to grant him wisdom -- not inspiration, not command, not integrity, not recognition, not imagination, however much these things might follow. But insight."Wisdom," being translated, is first recognition, followed by deep understanding, then knowing what to say or to do, then as required by acting wisely.

    "Yes, a little circle of light." Just imagine. That would be no small thing for God to grant us at Christmas. Or for the New Year.

    Or at any time.