For today in National
Poetry Month, I was going to give you something by John Donne. Donne is
easy to absorb as a teenager, which is when I became aware of him. He wrote both sacred and profane poetry. I was
surprised at how, ah, earthy some of the latter were. (Well, I was kind of
naïve in my teens.) But he was quite the Jack-the-lad before he became Dean of
St. Paul’s.
Everyone—everyone knows his “No man is an island” (officially,
“Meditation XVII” from Devotions upon
Emergent Occasions, and maybe not even a poem in structure) and perhaps
it might be therapeutic to put it here, since it’s good to be reminded that we’re
all connected to events that take place far away from us. The incidents in
Boston this week diminished us all—as do events in Iraq and Pakistan and Somalia.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
But in some ways, Donne is a cheap shot. We all know
we’re involved in mankind, even if we try to dodge it. And Donne’s words have
been with us for nearly 400 years. Have we paid attention? Only sporadically.
So my official entry today is from the Book of
Psalms (King James version). You can squawk if you want about whether any
individual Psalm is a poem, but this is my damned blog and I’m the boss of
it.
I’m sharing with you one that was given to me by a
fellow retreatant when I was in my 20s. We were at a convent somewhere in the
San Fernando Valley, on a weekend retreat; three women trying to work through
individual challenges to our lives. I’ve been thinking about that a lot
recently, because I appear to have got lost along the way from that place &
I’m not sure how to get back.
Anyhow, this woman—much more adept with scripture
than I’ll ever be—looked at me, put her hand on my shoulder and said, “This
is your Psalm.” I don’t know why it should be, but here it is, number 121:
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,
from whence
cometh my help.
My help cometh from the LORD,
which made
heaven and earth.
He will not suffer thy foot to be moved:
he that
keepeth thee will not slumber.
Behold, he that keepeth Israel
shall neither
slumber nor sleep.
The LORD is thy keeper:
the LORD is
thy shade upon thy right hand.
The sun shall not smite thee by day,
nor the
moon by night.
The LORD shall preserve thee from all evil:
he shall
preserve thy soul.
The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy
coming in
from this
time forth, and even for evermore.
I’m strangely comforted by the idea of a presence shading
my right side. It may not be as important that it be there, as that I believe
it is.
You have to start small and work your way up to
mankind.
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