Welcome to the 8th Anniversary edition of the Poem of the Month!
I took some time over the holidays to clean out my email contacts, and was happy to add some new email address of family and friends to this Poem of the Month list who I thought might appreciate it. To those of you who are new, welcome!
I started this Poem of the Month in January of 2004, inspired by a fellow poetry lover who had done something similar for several years himself. As a former English college professor slogging away in the corporate training world, I found that I missed the creative outlet of reading poetry and sharing it with others who also might appreciate it. The Poem of the Month was born with the selection of “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins in January 2004 as the inaugural Poem of the Month.
This month’s selection really came about in response to seeing an old friend’s Facebook post that her mother had “reached her final destination” and had passed away after a long journey with Alzheimer’s. I’m sure most of us have experienced some kind of loss in our lives – I remember vividly the passings of my grandfather and grandmother and one of my best friends in high school. Those were all very riveting, painful experiences, but deep down somewhere I knew that these passings – while painful – were part of the natural order of things. I recalled a funeral procession that had passed me once on a New Orleans street and I remember thinking – wow, talk about a fun way to go out…upbeat music, dancing in the streets and smiles on everyone’s face. I re-read that Facebook post and thought –wow, what a perspective to see the passing of a loved one as the natural end to a long journey.
I thought about a poem to honor those who we’ve lost – both recent and in the distant past. Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” immediately popped into my head, and while that is a tremendous poem, it carried a sentiment of defiance and raging against death rather that one that saw that death could be an uplifting experience. I finally found a poem by Abdellatif Laabi that I think fits the bill.
Abdellatif Laabi
(1942 – )
The Earth Opens and Welcomes You
To the memory of Tahar Djaout*
on the day of his funeral
The earth opens
and welcomes you
Why these cries, these tears
these prayers
What have they lost
What are they looking for
those who trouble
your refound peace?
The earth opens
and welcomes you
Now
you will converse without witnesses
O you have things to tell each other
and you’ll have eternity to do so
Yesterday’s words tarnished by the tumult
will one by one engrave themselves on silence
The earth opens
and welcomes you
She alone has desired you
without you making any advances
She has waited for you with Penelopian ruses.
Her patience was but goodness
and it is goodness brings you back to her
The earth opens
and welcomes you
she won’t ask you to account
for your ephemeral loves
daughters of errancy
meat stars conceived in the eyes
accorded fruits from the vast orchard of life
sovereign passions that make sun
in the palm’s hollow
at the tip of the tipsy tongue
The earth opens
and welcomes you
You are naked
She is even more naked than you
And you are both beautiful
in that silent embrace
where the hands know how to hold back
to avoid violence
where the soul’s butterfly
turns away from this semblance of light
to go in search of its source
The earth opens
and welcomes you
Your loved one will find again some day
your legendary smile
and the mourning will be over
Your children will grow up
and will read your poems without shame
your country will heal as if by miracle
when the men exhausted by illusion
will go drink from the fountain of your goodness
O my friend
sleep well
you need it
for you have worked hard
as an honest man
Before leaving
you left your desk clean
well ordered
You turned off the lights
said a nice word to the guardian
And then as you stepped out
you looked at the sky
its near-painful blue
You elegantly smoothed your mustache
telling yourself:
only cowards
consider death to be an end
Sleep well my friend
Sleep the sleep of the just
let us for awhile carry the burden
Créteil, June 4, 1993
