Posts Tagged ‘death’
🎵 The Problem with Regret
I have hung my harp upon the years, yet in every wind that passes, I hear her name.
- from the journals of exile
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept;
we hung our harps upon the willows.”
— Psalm 137 : 1-2
I.
By the waters of memory, I sat down and wept,
And hung my harp on the limb of the years.
The wind in the reeds made a sound like forgiveness,
But it wasn’t forgiveness I heard — it was fear.
II.
Regret is a carrion bird, circling slow,
Feeding on grief that refuses to die.
Its shadow falls long over everything holy,
And whispers, you could have loved better than I.
III.
It never flies lonely — recrimination comes near,
A beast in the dark with a tongue made of blame.
They feast on the bones of what memory offers,
And leave me the echo, the ache, and the name.
Refrain
It wasn’t the box but the silence that fed them,
The years I mistook for the comfort of peace.
Now I open my hands and the feathers fall upward —
They vanish like breath, but the hunger won’t cease.
IV.
I walk through the hush where her laughter once stood,
Through the door that no heartbeat will open again.
And I hear from the willow the faintest of music —
A string half-broken still answering pain.
Coda
By the waters of memory, I sat down and wept,
And hung my harp on the limb of the years.
The song that I lost is the one that still finds me,
And silence itself is the sound that I fear.
The Problem with Regret
(from Random Musings)
Regret is a carrion bird.
It feeds on the grief of those who have loved and lost.
It seldom flies alone.
Its companion is another scavenger beast — recrimination.
As I walk the corridors of memory, both bitter and sweet,
I feel the air stir with their wings.
They circle close, patient and hungry.
I tell myself I am learning —
how I might have been a better man,
a better husband,
a better soul who held nothing back
from the one who withheld nothing from me.
But what I discover instead is a new sorrow.
It is regret itself —
made of things not done, not said,
and of the hurtful words once spoken.
Together they feast upon the bones of memory,
tearing at what flesh remains
until scarcely a heartbeat is left behind.
They shred the heart and leave the mind exhausted.
And I cry out, no more — let me remember no more.
For a moment I reach for the box
that has kept my memories safe these many years,
and begin to put them back,
thinking I might rest if I forget.
But then I remember:
it was not the box that fed these beasts,
but the silence.
And to return to silence
would only feed them again.
Heading to Epiphany
In the provencial naivete of my youth I was curious why, while traveling in Spain, they still had Christmas lights up in January. Having no familiarity with Epiphany and only vaguely aware that the “Twelve Days of Christmas” had some basis in fact left me clueless.
 Since then I have aquired an affection for a theological understanding of the term and I have adopted it as a frame of reference to explain the unexpected intrusions of good ideas into my otherwise mundane life.
 Epiphanies, if not ‘the’ Epiphany, are intrusions in fact. I imagine being seated in a comfortable chair quietly assimilating the characteristics of a potatoe when an idea, a good one, lands somewhere above and to the right of my hippocampus. My rapid transformation into barely sentient starch is halted by an immediate, if not always welcome, reaction.
I find, as years pass, that the frequency of these intrusions has not abated but my ability to resist them has grown. My resitance to these is unfortunate for some but as my epiphanies have not produced any vaccines, life transforming technologies, or even a particularly good sermon, the declining number of reactions has hurt no one other than myself.
Realizing this leads me to think that it may now be time for me to pursue such moments rather than wait for them. I need to hitch myself to a team of verbs and ‘go’. Of course I recall my preferred cliche for explaining my inaction, “My get-up-and-go got up and went.”
Why don’t I want to ‘go’? Is it because those with whom I would most wish to share are unaffected or, worse, alienated by my experiences? My children are generally disinterested in the things that interest me. This is as it should be, I suppose. Their epiphanies may have another source and, in any case, another direction.
As for me, I find myself aware of God’s presence, or more often God’s absence. I find myself seated in church and keenly aware that God seems to have taken a long sabbatical. Maybe “The Almighty” is looking for new material or is engaged in the plight of more interesting parishoners. I can’t say where God is, but I feel pretty certain of where God is not.
 God seems to have little relevance to my children which is a shame because I am certain despite God’s prolonged absence it is a temporary state. Perhaps their generation has confused God with church? Church, temple, mosque, shrine, mantra, etc, as expressions of religion, are not synomyns for God. But that is an epiphany for another day. The point here is that sooner or later God will come looking after us whether we happen to be looking for God. Surprise!
Someone, a friend now estranged by distance and time, recently called me. (An epiphany?)Â He found my number in the debris of abandoned letters and called. “How are you?” came the question to which I replied, “I get up. I eat breakfast. I go to work. I come home. I eat supper. I go to bed. I start over.”
Even as I complained about the grossly mundane nature of my life I realized that it is far more complicated than that. “How are you?” “Oh, well, I am on the road to Epiphany.”
I know not when, where, or how but the day is closer now than ever, the day of my greatest Epiphany. It is not simply a matter of ‘the great sleep’ that awaits us all. It is the moment of final wakefulness when some of us, at least, find our conscious minds alert to the reality that the road has reached it’s end and the moment of transition has come.
 Whether it is simply a transition from sensibility and intent to decaying matter vaguely familiar to the bereaved (“Oh, he looks so natural.”) or something more I cannot say. I do not know. It is a mystery. The most avid athiest can be no more authoritative in this regard than the most ardent fundamentalist cleric. It is a mystery but I hold to the notion that in that moment there is a cosmic ‘surprise’.
I am on the road to Epiphany. I hope I have a ways to go; A long ride down a bumpy road loaded with smaller ephanies. And I hope, in the meantime, to be more vigorous in response to the little epiphanies of each day.
On a whim... 