Soap Suds

Lea Wight, "Cottage Sink"

Soap Suds

This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big

House he visited when he was eight: the walls of the bathroom open

To reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoop

To rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.

And these were the joys of that house: a tower with a telescope;

Two great faded globes, one of the earth, one of the stars;

A stuffed black dog in the hall; a walled garden with bees;

A rabbit warren; a rockery; a vine under glass; the sea.

To which he has now returned. The day of course is fine

And a grown-up voice cries Play! The mallet slowly swings,

Then crack, a great gong booms from the dog-dark hall and the ball

Skims forward through the hoop and then through the next and then

Through hoops where no hoops were and each dissolves in turn

And the grass has grown head-high and an angry voice cries Play!

But the ball is lost and the mallet slipped long since from the hands

Under the running tap that are not the hands of a child.

Louis MacNiece

"To which he has now returned." Most of us must have experienced this at least once in our lives, where a scent takes us back to a place or event or person from the past so swiftly, and for a moment comes vividly alive. To read the details MacNiece remembers is wonderful - his age, the season, the house, its unique objects, and the feeling of being in a child-size body. And how he so brilliantly shows the shock of returning to the present moment and his grown up body. It's the experience this poem encapsulates that makes me wonder sometimes are these moments like monuments somewhere, continuously present-tense? Of course, this would mean the bad moments too. Which doesn't bear thinking on. Nonetheless, I wonder - is Now truly as ephemeral as all this? Is there a something eternal touching this minute? I mean, I know there is, but it slips just beyond my comprehension. I suppose this is another layer of the "we see through a glass darkly" concept told about in 2 Corinthians. A mystery that beckons me further in.

Snowdrops

Raymond Booth

Snowdrops

Do you know what I was, how I lived?  You know

what despair is; then

winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,

earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect

to waken again, to feel

in damp earth my body

able to respond again, remembering

after so long how to open again

in the cold light

of earliest spring—

afraid, yes, but among you again

crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

Louise Gluck

"Do you know how I lived?" I think this must be the cry of everyone who has lived through trauma and death. There's this great burden of pain and isolation that screams inside, "You don't know me! You don't know how I live! You don't know what I'm going through!" And yet, we can't express it, either. We know there is no true way of explaining it. We know it won't be grasped. This is a powerful poem because it acknowledges all that, even the "I did not expect to survive", which is something we don't talk about much, but some of us have lived through things we feel should have killed us. It is strange and disorienting to find one's self still breathing. How can it be? How is it my body still cycles on? How is it the days pass? Something died. Something was injured and killed within me. There has been blackness and despair and anger and grief, and yet I open my eyes and find I'm still here. Whether I want to be or not. In the poem this is called Winter. Winter is death, dormancy, burial. But it is a season. And seasons pass. And then the most surprising thing of all happens. We discover we're not dead, we're a seed. And a new pain comes, the visceral pain of breaking out of our seed-casing, of pushing up against the blackness that covers us, of rising in spite of the fear we feel. "Crying yes risk joy". I don't know of a better way to say it.