Poem and Postcard
This morning, alone in my home, with sunlight streaming in from the skylight to my right and steady tick tick ticks sounding from the wall clock to my left, creative energy pings within me like a small steel ball tracing an unpredictable erratic zig-zag pattern in a pinball machine.
In following the zigs and zags of a personal project, I bump into a poem, I bump into a postcard. The postcard is one I painted and sent to my dad not knowing then that he would no longer be alive nine months later. My eyes fill with quick tears; my heart feels joy, tenderness, fullness.
I watch the way loss and love and letting go begin to fit together like puzzle pieces as they find their place in the shape of things while I spruce up the postcard a bit and prepare to mail it to a new friend.
Here is the poem:
We think we get over things.
We don’t get over things.
Or say, we get over the measles
but not a broken heart.
We need to make that distinction.
The things that become part of our experience
never become less a part of our experience.
How can I say it?
The way to “get over” a life is to die.
Short of that, you move with it,
let the pain be pain,
not in the hope that it will vanish
but in the faith that it will fit in,
find its place in the shape of things
and be then not any less pain but true to form.
Because anything natural has an inherent shape
and will flow towards it.
And a life is as natural as a leaf.
That’s what we’re looking for:
not the end of a thing but the shape of it.
Wisdom is seeing the shape of your life
without obliterating (getting over) a single
instant of it.
—Albert Huffstickler, The Cure
Here is the postcard:
4 x 5.5″; acrylic, pencil, ink, and collage on card stock
exploration with neutrals
https://dottyseiter.blogspot.com/2020/06/streetable-7.html
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14 responses to “Poem and Postcard”
Sheila, thank you for this comment in this moment, taking me back as it has to when I posted it over a week ago. Rereading “The Cure” just now gives me a fresh chance to tap into that wonderful, hopeful mood you refer to. Perfect : )
Thank you for being such a faithful long-time follower.
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I really invite you to post your haiku’s, because I always love your posts, I love your writing, and I love you interpreting/writing about other poets poems, but I am so eager to read your poems!
I know: we are speechless too here. I couldn’t believe the news when Steven told me this morning. I was 100% convinced Kamala would win, it’s such a pity (wrong word). Still can’t believe it, but it is what’s happening.
Thank you for sharing this tender mention of your late husband’s birthday, Carol.
And, yes, I do value the bittersweet act of moving on by sending/giving art I’ve created—previously owned by someone dear to me who has passed on—to a new collector. I visited a friend recently whom I haven’t seen for several months, and I loved seeing a bookmark I’d given her on her coffee table; it was a found composition from another of the postcards I’d sent my dad a number of years prior
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