Today, my words are lacking. This last week and most of last weekend my words have been lacking, so I offer bits from previous writings, and a poet whose words I have shared before.
It is often nothing more than the gentle acts of caring that see us through the day. I wrote in my snipit style memoir of this gentleness:
“[There] continues to be something in the word during the
showers of spite; something in that smile saying, I am listening and I hear you, while the fog of muted emotion fills
the air and the mind; something in those patient eyes and open hands . . .” These “somethings” can be painful; I want to do it myself, fix it myself. But that won’t do. It doesn’t work. We need someone to talk to, albeit frightening. We carry eachother through life. “[We] owe [our] existence to others, to those who offer the simple
words, the smile, the kind eyes, the gentle hands, to a broke soul. They
reassure [us] that [our hearts are] beating, and that maybe, one more day or minute or
moment is worth the while.”
Small but Urgent
Request to the Unknowable
Whatever small nugget of kindness we
carry,
that shy opal I picture buried in gray
folds
of a cortex evolved to flinch at fire
and whittle sharp sticks when beasts
stalk too close; whatever prompts
bereaved widows to offer you coffee then
the guestbook, and parched sailors adrift
to share the day’s thimble of water,
and mothers to lift the most bent and
broken
children with joy and glad for the work
of it;
whatever iota of caring has survived
the millennia’s hardships, ice age and
terror
and the simple tedium of walking upright—
maybe it’s no bigger now than a seed
in a fig—tonight I call for it, call
with my dry mouth from this cold room
clouded by my being alive
on a planet whose true gravity
eludes me; let that pinprick of light
multiply in the sky’s nightly leather
and in the pupil of each eye. Let me seek
it
in the large, crazed creatures whose
shadows
I fear most, in myself, for instance.
Kneeling, I poke at this ash-heaped
hearth in hope
of some faint imagining, grateful for
that.
Mary Karr
