Hero's Poetry Journey, week 8
TRIAL: Ordeal
Hello, Poetry Friend
It’s decision time, here on Trial Road. And it’s a whole ordeal.
Ordeal
When we make choices, especially as mothers, we don’t know the result. We never know what would have happened if we had chosen another path. The choosing is itself our ordeal.
Motherhood Indecision
While straightening my child’s room one Thursday morning, I found a journal, laying open (which never, ever happened). I made a choice that as a writer I had vowed to never make: I read the entry. The words sounded very suicidal. I called our family’s counselor, who said we needed to pull our child out of school immediately for a session.
Would you believe this happened on Halloween?
By evening all seemed to be okay. The counselor scheduled another appointment the following week. The grandparents came to take the child to dinner. I went to church, not knowing what else to do, and thanking God the eve of All Saints and/or the next day was a holy day of obligation.
Several people told me I overreacted. I’ll never know. Because most of our choices are not right vs. wrong or good vs. bad, but nests vs. mountains.
And there we stand, “saw in hand.”
“Choices” by Tess Gallagher
The woman in this poem has an impossible choice. She wants a view: “a view to snow / on the mountain.” I think of Never Summer Range in Rocky Mountain National Park, how cool and comforting it is to see snow on Chapin, Chiquita, and Ypsilon, even in August, when back home I can only see “a landscape August has already drained of green.” But I don’t want to deprive a bird family of their home in “the uppermost branches” just so I can have a room with a view.
To cut “saplings” is a choice. To leave them uncut is also a choice. The saw grows heavy in our hand.
Poetry Journal
Read Gallagher’s poem. Jot down what you notice, what you like, what you don’t, what questions you have, and at least one way in which the poem speaks to your soul.
Write about an ordeal which involved an impossible choice.
Read Gallagher’s poem aloud. Pick one phrase or line or stanza you can tuck deep in your heart.
Write your own haiku about this stage of your hero’s poetry journey. (Mine is at meganwillome.com.) If you like, email me what you write.
Happy Poeming!
Megan
Hi Megan, I have been meaning to say hi and welcome to Substack, not many of us professed poets here. Good to have your company as a fellow wordsmith.
Yes, we stand “saw in hand” along with your harrowing Mother’s tale and Tess’s poem.
"Love, love, a lily's my care,
She's sweeter than a tree.
Loving, I use the air
Most lovingly: I breathe;
Mad in the wind I wear
Myself as I should be,
All's even with the odd,
My brother the vine is glad."
Now what in your words summoned that out of me? I can still recite it after all these slip-sliding away years and tears (rhymes with bears) in the tent of time.
Know the poet? Hint: his shortened first name rhymes with dead. I used to carry his collected poems to the pub in Hamilton, Ontario, circa 1967 to accompany my loneliness while dodging the cold drafts.
And while I have your saw in my hand, here is one of the forests in one of the trees from my “The Husbanding of a Life” collection of poems that began with the death of my Other Half, Dec 17, 1996:
“My darling it is true,
You cured myself of me
And I cured you of you.
From death's ground we grew.
Bound freely to trust,
Love, we came to care.
What matters is the mind we shared.
As long as truth could tell,
The god we gathered was us.
Our tree stands for the good of all.
We understood and lived the Fall.”
Looking forward to reading you.
Stay free then safe.
I love everything about this, Megan! The idea that acting or not acting are both choices is interesting and one I haven't thought about in 30 years of parenting. Thank you for expanding my perspective today.