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You who saw
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You who saw the
morning fall on leaves
all rotted and brown but
kissed this darkest turn
and threw your coins to the clouds.
You who loved and always learned
that love is nothing earned.
You who opened your heart to a child
and let her wed and weave her own.
You who felt the wanting grave
when you felt the skeleton hand of a friend
unchained.
You who beheld your wife like a sunrise
and gave her everyday a new light to live for.
You who are so beautiful and always beginning,
like a band of circling swallows, like a whale
first seen in the wild, like the scent of home.
You are a thousand good men on a morning walk,
the chapel bell’s waking call, sweet and deep
as the true belief in miracles.
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Copyright © 2002 by Allison Grayhurst
amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst
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First published in “Nostrovia! Milk and Honey Siren Anthology”
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You can listen to the poem by clicking below:
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“Allison Grayhurst intertwines a potent spirituality throughout her work so that each poem is not simply a statement or observation, but a revelation that demands the reader’s personal involvement. Grayhurst’s poetic genius is profound and evident. Her voice is uniquely authentic, undeniable in its dignified vulnerability as it is in its significance,” Kyp Harness, singer/songwriter, author.
“Allison Grayhurst’s poems are like cathedrals witnessing and articulating in unflinching graphic detail the gritty angst and grief of life, while taking it to rare clarity, calm and comfort. Grayhurst’s work is haunting, majestic and cleansing, often leaving one breathless in the wake of its intelligence, hope, faith and love amidst the muck of life. Many of Allison Grayhurst’s poems are simply masterpieces. Grayhurst’s poetry is a lighthouse of intelligent honour… indeed, intelligence rips through her work like white water,” Taylor Jane Green, Registered Spiritual Psychotherapist and author.
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This is a wonderful poem, Allison. The start of it is mysterious:
You who saw the
morning fall on leaves
all rotted and brown but
kissed this darkest turn
and threw your coins to the sun.
Part of its mystery comes from the fact that it is incomplete sentence. The stanza leaves us hanging in the air–who is you? There is some sense to it. The you is a person when morning fell on leaves all rotted and brown, kissed the darkest turn and then turned around and threw coins (your coins) meaning special coins, wealth, into the sun.
As we read on we find out a lot more about “you”:
You who loved and always learned
that love is nothing earned.
You who opened your heart to a child
and let her wed and weave her own.
There is a wonderful truth about love in these lines, the idea that love is nothing earned, but is a gift that you then have to let go so that the child to which a human’s heart is opened, can then go on to weave her life.
Then the darkness:
You who felt the wanting grave
when you felt the skeleton hand of a friend
unchained.
The wanting grave, the skeleton hand of a friend unchained (from life?), the sorrow that happens even in the midst of love and goodness. The unchaining of life from death, the last remains of a friend even if they are still a friend with a skeleton hand…
Somberness leads to my favorite lines, as you might suspect of me:
You who beheld your wife like a sunrise
and gave her everyday a new light to live for.
I have failed to achieve this ideal, but I have beheld Ethel like a sunrise, and I have tried to give her light, even though I am afraid that my attempts have not always met the mark. But what wonderful thoughts–that giving her everyday a new light to live for might be possible even in the face of the darker moments in life, the losses we face in life.
A person who could achieve that central blessing deserves the next lines:
You who are so beautiful and always beginning,
like a band of circling swallows, like a whale
first seen in the wild, like the scent of home.
They are like the glory of the earth, beautiful, and always beginning, and a you that the poet describes is the sum of a thousand good men on a walk, like a chapel bell awakening, a man
…sweet and deep
as the true belief in miracles.
This is not the most powerful poem of those I just finished reading, but it is the most wonderful, Allison, and therefore I felt like picking it out for comment. There is goodness and an observation of goodness in this poem, and though I deal with trials and tribulations of people everyday at the college as they try to deal with complex lives, I still appreciate goodness when I run across it and believe I should notice it when I encounter its presence.
Thank you for this poem. It made my day.
Very powwwweruful poem. Thanks for sharing it.