Greetings, readers. I live in Florida. Currently we are being pummeled by COVID, mostly the Delta variant. Our situation is all over the news. Why? For a few reasons, but in a large and bizarre way it’s due to our governor refusing to urge preventative measures.
Meanwhile, on the island of Bali, Indonesia, my husband and I have dear Balinese friends in the hospital battling COVID for their lives. Bali does not have the extensive resources we have in the U.S.
In this atmosphere of crushing grief, I turn to some masterful poetry. Here’s a story about one poem that’s always been there for me. The poem itself appears here at the end.
Poetry for grief
About twenty-five years ago, I attended a reading festival in Tampa, Florida, where I was living at the time. At one session in a large auditorium, the poet Dionisio D. Martinez (from whom I later took a poetry workshop), strode to the podium and beneath a stark spotlight, read a poem written by the poet Jack Gilbert. It was so powerful I could not speak for hours afterwards. It is copied below.
Later, I bought Jack Gilbert’s book The Great Fires, which contains the poem. I have it close by on a shelf. Gilbert’s voice in the poem is direct and clear. His wife, a sculptress named Michiko, had died, which prompted the poem.
Perhaps it will be of value to you as it is to me.
Jack Gilbert’s poem
Michiko Dead
He manages like somebody carrying a box
that is too heavy, first with his arms
underneath. When their strength gives out,
he moves the hands forward, hooking them
on the corners, pulling the weight against
his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly
when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes
different muscles take over. Afterward,
he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood
drains out of the arm that is stretched up
to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now
the man can hold underneath again, so that
he can go on without ever putting the box down.
__________________________
Thanks for reading!
Your writer on the wing,
Charlene
Peggy Lantz
Yes, we never put the box down; we just shift it around.
Charlene L. Edge
I think of my mother often when I read this poem. She died when I was sixteen.
John Arnett
But how many boxes can one man or one country carry. There will soon be thousands of boxes in Afghanistan and the news reporters will bombard us with those images…. for about a week
Charlene L. Edge
It’s a terrible situation, haunting and sad. Heavy boxes.
Linda Goddard
Charlene,
Thank you for sharing this poem. Oh the boxes we carry, shifting them, manipulating their weight in our lives.
I share your frustration with our governor–what’s going on inside his head?
I’m sending you hugs for safety an wellness. I’m so sorry about your friends in Bali.
Charlene L. Edge
Thanks for reading! and for your good wishes for our Balinese friends. The mother, Suryani, is one of Hoyt’s longtime colleagues, a psychiatrist who has helped many people by teaching them meditation. She and Hoyt did research together for many years. When we spent two months in Baliin 2009, I got to know the family.
Kathleen Brandt
Thanks for this lovely poem. The boxes seem immense at the moment, and there’s no relief in sight. I guess we all have to learn to be like the man in the poem, shifting the weight around, learning to live with the ‘new normal’.
Charlene Edge
Hi Kathleen,
Thanks for reading and for the comment. Indeed. Life’s continual adjustments … especially hard for anyone who has lost a loved one to this pandemic. Or in the Afghan war. Or any other way.