My Little Poem: world

"God's World" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Hello, Poetry Friend

(Forgive me: I am going full Enneagram in this post. Feel free to skip.)

It took me decades — into my 40s — to admit who I am: a wildflower 4, who needs, at the very least, the big box of 64 crayons to describe all my feelings at any given minute. I swing from lust for beauty to envy of happinesses denied. I love words and notes and dark walks.

And yet. I keep shoving myself into a rigid routine. Mistaking the gifts of regularity for an unachievable spell called balance. Now I can say, No thank you. I was meant to feast and to fast. To be too busy on weekends and crash on Monday with too much coffee. To let passion have its play.

Perhaps I am a little like Edna St. Vincent Millay, who knew the length and depth and height and breadth of the glory of God’s world. This poem of hers may be the truest poem of me I’ve ever read. I could not hope to write it even if I had 256 colors in my playbox.

God's World

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
   Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
   Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour!   That gaunt crag
To crush!   To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
         But never knew I this;
         Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

–Edna St. Vincent Millay

A lesser poet would have ended this poem at “Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;” But Millay prays for the beauty to stop. She can’t take it anymore.

I suspect she keeps taking it.

It is summer, nowhere near the fall in Millay’s poem, and the world is both too hot and still pretty. Endless blue above. Mexican hats and firewheels below. Hummingbirds and bees jostling for nectar in my backyard bushes. Birds.

My sainted husband knows the signs of too-muchness: Time for Megan to go outside on the back patio with a cup of tea (iced, these days) and the dog and too many poetry books and a pencil and some blank pages. I may say, “Let fall / No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call,” but then, there I am again, ready to let fall when the next bird calls my name.

I cannot hold thee close enough.

[…]

I cannot get thee close enough.

Somehow my 4-ness missed that whole diva gear, so being vulnerable, through poetry and song, is still hard. It “stretcheth me apart.” When I get to cantor a special Mass, or when a poem I really love gets published and someone sees it and says something that shows they feel it in their tippy toes, then “My soul is all but out of me.”

It happened last Sunday. It was my day to deliver Eucharist, and one of my stops is a women’s drug and alcohol rehab center. One woman hung back in a doorway while we prayed and read and sang. Afterward she came up to me. “When you started singing, grace came out and I could finally breathe.”

I hugged her like she was a long-lost child, and we both cried. God’s world stretches to unknown glories, crushes gaunt crags, welcomes bird calls.

Happy Birds, Sober Women

Christmas came early with the wood thrush’s ee-oh-lay.
The women chatter as they walk. Today they feel okay
although it’s hard—from kids and parents—to be away.
 
A red-shouldered hawk offers up a kee-rah.
Souls squeeze into the break room, so near—Uh,
sorry! I’m not Catholic but I’m here. No fear of
 
anywhere Jesus is. Cassin’s sparrow says psit,
let us pray. Less than 30, lifetimes of hurt.
Can such mistakes be reversed?
 
A black-capped vireo insists, with rapid jidit,
We’re gonna sing, right? We are! Let us remit
our past. God is with us. He’s legit.
 
We exit to the sound of the canyon wren’s tsee.
Hark! the feathered angels sing.
We came in worn, left free, left we.

–Megan Willome

Happy poeming!

Megan