How A Temper Grows Up

In the morning there is a doorway—

bare bone soft feet step bare

so as not to make floorboards scold.

Voices lowered by the dawn,

a small body pressed to the lapel of a kitchen wall,

a cast iron skillet speaking pancake batter.

This is the world of the newly born,

plus the alleyway off Galt Ave.

and the front yard tree with branches for arms.

There is rage at the taking of things,

lullabies to sooth the inability to dress oneself,

to bathe oneself clean of the day.

The outside is where the swings are

that keep from the sky, where I learn

feeling the wind is like flying standing still.

If I am to be here there must be a blaze,

or at least something that spits and howls

and is not too stubborn to die after burning.

When I learn to love

remind me of the whip between my teeth,

of the bees trapped in my mouth.

Call me home twice like dinner is cold

before I run to beat you

to the place my breath is heaviest.

Most times I can’t find my hands,

left inside where the world can’t get in

if I close the door tight enough.

In here these voices claw at the wall

loud as shadows and I fight them

like my fists have never known flat palms.

I have calmed this rage to a rain

you will still smell in your clothes

the morning after. 

By Makenzie Berry

The Peace Of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

- Wendell Berry 

Dirge Without Music by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned

With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—

They are gone.  They are gone to feed the roses.  Elegant and curled

Is the blossom.  Fragrant is the blossom.  I know.  But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

memory #85: The old man in the wheelchair

It was difficult for my grandfather to accept that his body was failing him. Inside his frail shell, his spirit raged. His soul remained young and willing, but his days were filled with long winters that came like an avalanche, weighing him down and suffocating the life out of him. He realized that there would be no more springs. 

"I guess we'll be taking my elephant skin to a nursing home," he said with a laugh, as my young son tenderly caressed his arm, which he found exotic and beautiful, much like the elephant's skin he had seen at Brookfield Zoo. 

"¿Qué piensas, astronauta?" he asked my son. My son smiled and rested his cheek on his great-grandfather's arm.

Just a week or two after our visit, my grandparents reluctantly moved to an assisted living facility. There, they befriended an elderly man in a wheelchair who had no visitors and hadn't seen his son or daughter in years. Every time I drove my parents to Muscatine, Iowa, we would invite him over for a visit. We brought him sweets, word puzzles, and knick-knacks, but most importantly, we engaged him in conversation. He would share memories of his wife and children. It was often emotional, yet I always managed to maintain my composure. Whenever he saw us, he would roll down the hallway as quickly as he could, waving and greeting us with, "¡Buen día, amigos! ¡Buen día!”

After my grandparents passed away, I became so consumed by my own problems that I pushed the memory of him into the far corners of my mind, where he gradually faded into obscurity. Years later, while talking to a friend whose parents were considering moving to an assisted living facility, I suddenly remembered that tiny old man. Since then, whenever I reflect on my own mortality, I imagine him sitting in his wheelchair by the entrance of the nursing home, beneath the apple blossoms, anxiously waiting for my arrival.