Findings

This week I’m in news overload, in which I withdraw from all news sources. It’s a spiritual fast, partly voluntary and partly reflex, when my lens gets completely clouded over by the brutality of the world, and the impossibility of performing some of the smallest actions of living without complicity in it.

I want to be a great mother who nourishes my children with a sense of well-being and hope. But I’m still growing myself. So I’m posting a children’s poem for Poetry Friday, John Mole’s deceptively simple “Variation On An Old Rhyme.” It’s a repetetive, “House That Jack Built” poem on its surface, mirroring through its form the process by which naive innocence learns to see progressively more facets of experience.

Does it conclude that we live in a crushingly indifferent universe? Or one that’s infused with a goodness that can’t be snuffed out? Though I can see an argument for the former, I vote for the latter. And because of the way an increasingly complex perspective is layered on stanza by stanza, to me it’s not glib; its optimism is hard-won:

This is the blackbird that wakes with a song.

This is the sun
That shines for the blackbird that wakes with a song.

This is the earth
That welcomes the sun
That shines for the blackbird that wakes with a song…

The whole text, complete with an authorial reading, is here. Poetry Friday is at Big A little a today.