Poetry Friday: The courage that my mother had

The courage that my mother had
Went with her, and is with her still:
Rock from New England quarried;
Now granite in a granite hill.

The golden brooch my mother wore
She left behind for me to wear;
I have no thing I treasure more:
Yet, it is something I could spare.

Oh, if instead she'd left to me
The thing she took into the grave!-
That courage like a rock, which she
Has no more need of, and I have.

-- Edna St. Vincent Millay

More Poetry Friday at Check It Out.

Poetry Friday: Majority

Now you'd be three,
I said to myself,
seeing a child born
the same summer as you.

Now you'd be six,
or seven, or ten.
I watched you grow
in foreign bodies.

Leaping into a pool, all laughter,
or frowning over a keyboard,
but mostly just standing,
taller each time.

How splendid your most
mundane action seemed
in these joyful proxies.
I often held back tears.

Now you are twenty-one.
Finally, it makes sense
that you have moved away
into your own afterlife.

-- Dana Gioia, from Pity the Beautiful. © Graywolf Press, 2012. More Poetry Friday at A Year of Reading.

A Most Ingenious Paradox

Another commenter has taken me to task for “whining” about what she calls the “tragically unremarkable” losses I spoke of in the previous post, and for calling myself broken when in fact I am blessed – among other things, to have a husband who generously married me “in spite of” all my apparent, well, brokenness. I understand what she means, for indeed I am very blessed. At the same time, I do feel that I’m called to an open position of mourning, for the very reason that the circumstances of my life have been tragically unremarkable. If our culture of abortion is so prevalent that even a Catholic woman, as I am assuming the commenter to be, can tell one of her sisters who’s suffered from it to “stop whining” and “deal with it,” what measure of compassion can we expect from those who consider themselves pro-choice, but who are, essentially, anti-woman and anti-child? I feel like my mourning has to bear some sort of witness to this very unremarkable tragedy. If the mourning of those like me is allowed to go forth, perhaps more hearts will be changed.

And as for being blessed, yes: God is so good and His mercy is so unfathomable. As Christ told Saint Faustina, those who deserve His mercy the least have the most right to it. This is truly one of the most amazing paradoxes of Christianity. Today’s Gospel reading (Matthew 20:1-16, about the workers who arrive at the eleventh hour and are given a full day’s pay) illustrates it well. Man is limited by justice, but God’s mysterious mercy is higher and deeper than our imaginations can conceive. I pray that God may pour out his Divine Mercy upon all those who read and comment on this blog.

Dead Musicians

I
From you, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart,
The substance of my dreams took fire.
You built cathedrals in my heart,
And lit my pinnacled desire.
You were the ardour and the bright
Procession of my thoughts toward prayer.
You were the wrath of storm, the light
On distant citadels aflare.

II
Great names, I cannot find you now
In these loud years of youth that strives
Through doom toward peace: upon my brow
I wear a wreath of banished lives.
You have no part with lads who fought
And laughed and suffered at my side.
Your fugues and symphonies have brought
No memory of my friends who died.

III
For when my brain is on their track,
In slangy speech I call them back.
With fox-trot tunes their ghosts I charm.
"Another little drink won't do us any harm."
I think of rag-time; a bit of rag-time;
And see their faces crowding round
To the sound of the syncopated beat.
They've got such jolly things to tell,
Home from hell with a Blighty wound so neat . . .

* * * * *
And so the song breaks off; and I'm alone.
They're dead . . . For God's sake stop that gramophone.

- Siegried Sassoon, Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918)
H/T: Soho the Dog