Morning Thanks: A Kooser poem to relive

 

[This is an oldie, with its own history, posted here originally in August of 2000, just a few months shy of the height of the Covid plague.]

At the Cancer Clinic
by Ted Kooser

She is being helped toward the open door
that leads to the examining rooms
by two young women I take to be her sisters.
Each bends to the weight of an arm
and steps with the straight, tough bearing
of courage. At what must seem to be
a great distance, a nurse holds the door,
smiling and calling encouragement.
How patient she is in the crisp white sails
of her clothes. The sick woman
peers from under her funny knit cap
to watch each foot swing scuffing forward
and take its turn under her weight.
There is no restlessness or impatience
or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
fills the clean mold of this moment
and all the shuffling magazines grow still.

She is not elderly. The young woman on stage in this Ted Kooser poem is being helped along by her sisters, both of them young, he says, suggesting she is too. That she is not elderly sharpens the sadness. Cancer seems most villainous when it chooses the young. 

I'd like to think that she may recover, but nothing in the poem suggests it. For her, it's a "great distance" to the examining room. She's slumped; her sisters  bend "to the weight of an arm," while that nurse in her white smock calls "encouragement." Her life is in danger.

The miracle of very real situation is that "There is no restlessness or impatience/or anger anywhere in sight," so decidedly different is what we're seeing from what we witness so regularly in the rest of the world. What's here in the waiting room is grace, Kooser says, gifts flowing from all directions--nothing less hard to find than love itself.

"Blessed are the pure in spirit," Jesus said, the first of the beatitudes, "for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Her case looks dire. I don't think Kooser sees this young cancer patient recovering. The woman in "her funny knit cap" is anything but arrogant.

But that doesn't mean that what Mr. Koozer witnessed one day "at the cancer clinic" is horror. What he sees is a testimony of grace so visible that the waiting room, just for a moment, is stunned by the rare beauty of sheer selflessness.

Today, we're in the middle of an epidemic ravishing families around the world, tens of thousands of ERs crowded with pestilence, so many--too many--people dying alone. Here in the U. S. daily deaths are right now, once again, exceeding a thousand a week.

But this too. Every day, every hour, every minute--someone with "the straight, tough bearing of courage" is helping someone, even those of us who are cancer free, towards the open door of the kingdom of heaven. 

Giving is one of those rare gifts that gives on giving. Ted Koozer's poem takes note of grace, and that's a blessing for which I'm thankful this morning.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 121

 

“. . .the sun will not harm you by day, 

nor the moon by night.”

It may be hard to believe but that old kid’s classic Goodnight Moon, written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd, has been around now for almost sixty years. My grandson, who wasn’t the easiest chap to get off to sleep, absolutely loved it. Goodnight Moon is a sweet old mood-enhancer whose magic somehow prompts delightful sleepiness.

For years, our grandson would search the dark sky. “Way da moon?” he’d say, as if he has to be sure that it’s up there watching over us.

Maybe it’s that book that makes me wonder about this line from psalm 121. Goodnight Moon such a meditative story that just thinking about it makes me want to yawn. It’s difficult for me to remember moments in my life, or even in story, when the moon, as the psalmist here seems to suggest, actually made me scared.

Darkness, surely. I was never quite as scared as I was one night on the shore of Lake Michigan, when, with a couple of other boys, we, 75 years ago, were lost in what seemed endless rolling sand dunes. Truth be known, we weren’t—we couldn’t have been more than a quarter mile from the lake. But we were out somewhere in the dunes—I have no idea why—when, in the darkness, we realized we had no idea where to go to get out. I was scared witless and spitless, even though I’m sure I never admitted it.

But I don’t remember the moon playing any role whatsoever in that fear. Darkness lit up our nerves, sheer darkness. The moon would have been a blessing.

To some Hindus, the moon is full of soma, an elixir of immortality only gods can drink. For the Fon of Abomey, in the Republic of Benin, Africa, Mawu, the goddess of the Moon, is an old mother who lives in the West and brings with her cool temps amid torrid summers, the goddess of night and joy and motherhood. As those t-shirts used to proclaim: “No fear.”

One night years ago up above Chamberlain, South Dakota, a number of us laid in the grass and watched the stars appear, the moon lighting the world bountifully overhead. An astronomer friend explained ancient mythologies as their stories appeared above us—it was pure joy. On our way down the steep hill we’d climbed to get there, the footing was treacherous because sheer darkness had arrived, even though we hadn’t noticed it. Once, a guy fell and rolled down a ways. That was a little scary. Thank goodness for the moon. Would have been much tougher without it.

Werewolves wail at it, and coyotes and real wolves, for that matter, which reminds me of an oil painting that inspired Willa Cather, in My Antonia, to tell a horrible tale about a wedding party entirely devoured by ravenous wolves—at night, of course. But I don’t remember moonlight in that painting. Even as a sliver, it’s hard for me to see the moon as anything but beautiful, sleek.

I don’t know that I’ve ever been afraid of the moon, but we all know fear, as did the psalmist. We all know the paralysis fear creates in us, even if it arrives only in our dreams.

And we all know the terrors of the darkness, the times when no matter what we try, we simply can’t find our way. At one time or another in our lives, everyone knows what it’s like to wander around with no light, with no direction, with no way home.

To those of us who know that kind of loss, this psalm, Psalm 121, is special gift, truly a blessing. God is watching us always, even in the dark, even in scant and scary light of the moon. So, well, "goodnight moon."

Highland, July 2013

There are a ton of these shots in my bank of old pics--a stratified prairie sky showing off its fanciest colors out east , a stage for awaiting the soon-to-arrive dawn. Sometimes you find treasures at places you could not have imagined. One has to learn to allow the scene to do its own work.

Long ago I stumbled on this chunk of ground without knowing a thing--or even imagining--the treasures it held. That weather-beaten tree stands, mostly alone, against untold acres of wide-brimmed farmland. Once there was a town here, but all that is left these days is a cemetery of only a few stones, an immigrant Norwegian-American cemetery (the names notably not Dutch). Those who might remember the place--it was determined to live here in this new country--have long ago departed.

Should you  spot this from the blacktop, you would see nothing particular; but out there in the middle of the section there's just something about the place that calls me back again and again because a constellation of its ordinary images make the place a scene that almost always delivers (not simply because it is a cemetery!)

Those faraway lights are Sioux Center's. 

Lebanon/Highland captured my attention for years. These shots were a visit on June 16, 2013, just a year after I retired from a lifetime of teaching.

Happiness

It's a gem I found six years ago, put up here for all kinds of people to see, then, sadly, never hit the publish. Thus, while it appears forever in my list of posts, no one else, save Joyce Sutphen readers, ever saw it. 

But it's hers, a Joyce Sutphen poem, a woman I never met. I've never heard from her read several collections of poems, even though she lives not so far away, regionally that is. She is an emeritus professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus University in St. Peter, MN, lives and works in Lutheran Minnesota. Every once in a while I have spent time with her poems and always found her world both recognizable and blessedly worthy. 

I intended sometime back in 2001 to create a post out of this poem--and never did. Just happened to turn it up this morning, six years after leaving it in the blog. I don't know why I never hit the Publish button, but the poem is as worthy today as it was then. So, a little late maybe, but just as healthy as ever--this Joyce Sutphen poem titled something hugely impossible to define and therefore compelling to try:

Happiness
by Joyce Sutphen

This was when my daughters were just children
playing on the rocky shore of the lake,

their hair in braids, their bright-colored jackets
tied around their waists. It was afternoon,

the shadows falling away, their faces
glowing with light. Whatever we said then

(and it must have been happy; it must have
been hopeful) is lost as I am now lost

from that life I lived. This was when nothing
that I wanted mattered, though all I wanted

was happiness, pure happiness, simple
as strawberries and cream in a saucer,

as curtains floating from a window sill,
as small pairs of shoes arranged in a row.

What's  unmistakable is the insistence of its regret, a conceit in poetry as old as any stanzas you might consider; the confession in the poem is as far from happiness as you might imagine ("Whatever we said then (and must have been happy; it must have/been hopeful") is lost as I am now lost"--a sad dark and soul-full confession. even though the list of unforgotten images prompt a fleeting smile.  

If I say this Sutphen is very "Lutheran," I might just as well say it's very Calvinist; there a mixture of "strawberries and cream in a saucer" set out as if to sweeten a dogged unsweetened reality: ". . .This is when nothing/that I wanted mattered, though all I wanted/was happiness," she says in a confession not to be missed. 

Simply to awaken our senses to her wistful moments is a gift.

Hegseth holds forth

Here's how AI describes D-Day, June 6, 1944: "D‑Day was a 50‑mile‑wide, multi‑national assault involving 156,000 troops, 7,000 ships, 12,000 aircraft, and 23,000 airborne soldiers, opening the door to the liberation of Europe."

That's a terrifying description, but a very helpful summary of an event that altered the world we live in yet today. The Allied invasion on June 6, 1944, was massive--just imagine how much sky is required for 12,000 aircraft, how much English channel it requires to float 7000 ships. 

D-Day remembrance celebrations are held worldwide, of course, since so much of the world was tightly wound in to the war-time fantasies of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. The presence of the U.S. of A. was unmistakable, and while, in judgement, it's altogether possible for this "sweet land of liberty" to look past the immense contributions of other Allied nations, it's impossible not to acknowledge the heft of American gifts, including much of the action on Utah Beach (most fiercely defended by the Axis powers) and the entire paratrooper fleet dropped into enemy territory before dawn on June 6.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a decorated war veteran himself, spoke last week at the D-Day Commemoration at Arlington National Cemetery, and used the occasion to warn celebrants that the problems created by immigration were just as threatening as the Axis powers' taking over Europe during the early years of World War II.

The speech--and especially that comparison--was roundly criticized, as it well should have been. 

The very real problems created by significant immigration--especially illegal immigration--have no contemporary corollary, especially illegal immigration, which is undertaken only by those who would like to find freedom somewhere far away from a culture where they live, a culture in which liberty has literal meaning.

Where does the Secretary get such errant comparisons?

Easy. From his boss.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 121

  “The Mighty One, God, the LORD, 

speaks and summons the earth 

from the rising of the sun to the place where it sets.”

 As far as I know, the county in which I live, Sioux County, Iowa, has no citizens of Sioux descent. What’s more, the town in which I lived for forty years—Sioux Center—is in no way a "center for the Sioux."  For most of 150 years now, it’s been a center for the Dutch, who were and are of no close relation to the Sioux. There lies a tale, of course, one that everyone knows: here and elsewhere across the plains, we won and they lost.

 A friend of mine, a congenial soul who loved repairing bridges we built with our prejudices, once asked a Sioux religious man to visit the college where I taught, asked him to speak in chapel.  Because chapel was a religious event, our guest took with him a sacred pipe.  Before he spoke, he lit the pipe, then turned to the four directions and led paleface kids through a ceremony meant to evoke God’s presence.

The symbolism, Black Elk says, works something like this:  the south brings warmth and new life in spring; the east, peace and light; the north is the source of cold, and thereby strength of character; and the from the west comes thunder and rain.  By raising the pipe to the four directions, the Lakota traditionally believe the spirits of the directions—all part of the God of the universe, Wakan Tanka—were being invoked for aid and comfort and trust throughout the ceremony.

 Such things simply aren’t done in the center for the Dutch. Some kids hit the warpath. What on earth was a pagan doing with holy smoke, bowing to the four winds or whatever?  The whole thing was, to some of them—and their parents--off-the-map heathen.

The opening lines of the mighty song of Psalm 50 make me wonder if the psalmist—whoever he was—would mind beginning worship with some sense of God’s hugeness, some kind of ritual meant to point towards a deity who is forever outside of time and space.      

 Honestly, I hear more Lakota in verse one than in a lot of evangelical Christianity.  Interesting, isn’t it, that the psalmist actually begins with three names—“the mighty one, God, the Lord”—each of which, in ancient Hebrew defined slightly different dimensions.  It’s as if the poet really wants to get all of this deity covered.  He doesn’t want to miss a characteristic.  He knows he can’t get all of God in focus, but, in humility, he wants to do the best he can, so he invokes with every possible name.

The second half of verse one moves east to west, not unlike the Sioux ritual.  There’s no sacred pipe here, but it doesn’t take all that much imagination for us to picture the possibility that some ancient Hebrew may have gestured just as broadly as that Native guy in our chapel.  To me, the line just feels Native.

One pair of seemingly irreconcilable characteristics of our God is that he is, at once, both imminent—right here beside us—and transcendent—forever somewhere beyond us.  The opening lines of Psalm 50 force us to consider his transcendence. Most of us, I think, would prefer a teddy bear.

 In fact, it’s not all that difficult to make verse one sound, well, primitive.  Give me a pipe, or an eagle feather and a smudge pot, I bet I could recite it in our college chapel this week and set some sweetly self-righteous kids on a heresy hunt. 

 But then, there’s not a Lakota in the neighborhood.  

June 6

June 7 will forever be "June 7," but to me June 6 will forever be something different, not because someone I knew was there on a beach in Normandy, but because of what went down there. Everyone connected with the secrecy of the operation on D-Day knew that the invasion would cost the Allied powers thousands of lives and it did--over 4000, with an equal number on the German side, if not more, considerably more. 

I don't know what goes on today, but the Memorial Day celebrations in my hometown, way back when, used to include--feature, in fact--the hometown vets from World War II. There were dozens of them when I was a boy, the wars in Europe and the South Pacific only a decade behind us.

But one of those vets always lit my childhood imagination more than others because my dad gave that man special honors, not because of memorable bouts of unquestionable heroism but because of where that WWII vet served--he was there, at Normandy, on June 6. Honestly, I don't know if my own perception is right--whether a man named "Linky" was there on the beach or not--but I know his face will forever be the face of D-Day in my mind because I'm quite sure my dad told me, long ago, that he was, and my boyhood imagination placed him there, on those killing beaches. 

"Linky" made it, even though 4000 of his buddies did not. He and his family lived just outside of town in a big corner house where he pulled on his khakis every Memorial Day for the parade. To my mind, he wasn't just a vet--lots of men my dad's age were vets; he was special because he was in one of those barge-like landing crafts, the LCVPs, as they were called; he was among those emptied onto Omaha Beach with thousands of others, many hundreds of whom would never move another step. Linky made it. When he'd march by on Memorial Day, I used to dream of the stories he could tell--if he chose to, and not every vet did. He was there.

My dad spent D-Day in the South Pacific aboard the kind of tugboat whose job it was to move battleships around foreign harbors. I don't know this for certain, but I can't help but believe that he never pulled on his Coast Guard uniform after the war because he believed in his heart that because he'd never seen action, spent his years of service on a tugboat, Memorial Day was meant for the Linkys, not the guys who never heard a bullet slash the air. 

Today is Linky's day--that's what I can't help feeling. Last weekend we went to Pressure, a finely crafted movie whose heart is in the Normandy invasion, June 6, 1944. 

My mother-in-law lost her fiancé this morning, 82 years ago, June 6, 1944. His name was TerHorst, and he was trained as an engineer. His job that morning to demolish the "hedgehogs," as they were called, the sharp obstructions meant to keep the Allies off the beaches. I don't think he got out of his LCVP. 

In this country, that June 6 is not a holiday doesn't mean it's not somehow remembered, even by those who wouldn't be born until after the end of the Second World War.

I wasn't born until 1948, but that doesn't mean I don't remember. Lots of us haven't and won't. 

And that, I'd like to think, is as it should be.

This morning I'm thankful for an abundance of gifts on this June 6.