CONSOLATIONS
-William Stafford
“The broken part heals even stronger than
the rest,”
they say. But that takes awhile.
And, “Hurry up,” the whole world says.
They tap their feet. And it still hurts on rainy afternoons when the same absent sun gives no sign it will ever come back.“What difference in a hundred years?”
The barn where Agnes hanged her child
will fall by then, and the scrawled words
erase themselves on the floor where rats’ feet run. Boards curl up. Whole new trees
drink what the rivers bring. Things die.“No good thing is easy.” They told us that,
while we dug our fingers into the stones
and looked beseechingly into their eyes.
They say the hurt is good for you. It makes
what comes later a gift all the more
precious in your bleeding hands.
I’ve been coasting off the grace of a single poem for over twenty-five years: Consolations by William Stafford.
I found it contained in slim volume of poems called Passwords that I picked up at sixteen.
I found this poem - No, this poem found me - in the months after I lost my grandfather to suicide.
It’s the first poem that I committed to memory.
It was the first but not the last loved-one that I have lost to suicide.
As a teen, I turned the words of this poem over and over in my mouth - a pebble, a prayer - it was inside me, and it lives there still.
This poem has given me solace, inspiration, and I have recited the words for others — even to a professor who told me, in a Seattle parking lot, that poetry was dead.
Poetry is, of course, not only alive, it is one of our greatest consolations!
But, they are everywhere, really — consolations — these beautiful life-saving acts of grace.
Do you know that if you google the name / model of a broken home-appliance, results will instantly pop-up of strangers in other parts of the country with your exact same broken appliance?
Someone who you have never met has made a video - with no regard for any personal gain - on how to fix your broken appliance.
A YouTube of a man in Nebraska guided me step-by-step through a recent dishwasher repair.
I found it very moving. The ways we yearn to connect and help one another.
I wanted to pay it forward by posting my own home repair videos. This would be reckless; I don’t know much about home repairs.
But I know about faith, and poetry, and I know about consolations.
I’m gathering them here to share with you.
.