Читать книгу Blink Spoken Here - Christopher Pendergast - Страница 16

Two Visitors

I enjoy writing poetry, especially free verse. It allows me the freedom to conjure up images, emotions and scenes without the demands and limits of prose. A poem gives me the opportunity to take the reader on quantum leaps of thought as I tell my story. For me, it is a powerful medium to express my complicated feelings and ideas. It is a rich, fertile field to plant them. I wrote this a year after my diagnosis.

I have for so long, loved the ocean.

I often went to its shore.

It seemed to just beckon me

with its carpet of soft sand and cool, blue water.

I can recall so very well the scent of sweet,

salted air that greeted me each time I neared.

In my mind’s eye, I still see its pallets of pebbles:

a rainbow of hues cast along the water’s edge.

I remember those long and winding wind-tossed

lines of shells, seaweed and bone

twisted down the shoreline

In it I found a treasure chest of nature’s surprises;

there were mermaid’s purses, jingle shells, feathers, shiny crab backs and small,

colorfully polished glass chips.

mm, and I recall too,

the melodies murmured by the gentle surf.

Of all of these images however,

I remember most the peace.

I found there an abiding air of harmony.

I sensed contentment, a joy.

Serenity

Once while there, a violent storm blew in.

As I watched, the distant skies grew dark and ominous:

the blue blotted by blackness,

the light breeze was whipped to a wind.

The sweet, salted air turned acrid and accosted me.

It beat against my unprotected face. The pebbles stung as they pelted me,

raging out of control as if as angry as the wicked wind that flung them.

And the gentle, murmuring surf?

It wailed eerily, hurling itself up and onto the beach.

It mouthed a moan, dragging itself back,

scraping across the sand

and into the jaws of the next frothing wave.

My gentle ocean and its soothing shore

turned cruel and unkind:

unfit for me or any living thing.

A sanctuary destroyed, it had morphed

into a bellowing beast.

The sands seemed to shift under my feet.

Uneasy, I began to retreat,

reluctantly yielding my paradise.

At that moment, in the height of this fury,

out of the darkened heavens

dropped a solitary, soaring gull.

Spellbound, I watched it being buffeted

by the turbulence.

To my amazement it held fast.

With wings bent awkwardly

and feathers twisted awry,

it struggled to ride the shearing winds,

unwilling to be beaten back.

As if defiantly claiming its right to the beach,

to this paradise,

it stubbornly hovered right above me.

I thought, how triumphant this new visitor.

A contrast to the unwanted and ill-tempered other one.

In my soul, I sensed the gull balanced the storm.

They seemed to equal each other in strength and intensity.

Slowly, I felt the serenity raise within me once more.

So steeled, I too, stayed.

We silently rode out the storm together.

After a time together we parted.

Distanced by lives and nature

but none the less woven into an unseen web,

we were one that gull and I.

Once, while busy living, another storm blew in.

Shrouded in stealth, ALS closed in.

It too was also terribly turbulent.

There were times when it was all I could do

to just hang on.

A vicious and unwanted vortex swirled about me.

Things slammed in from all directions, like the pebbles of the first storm.

I was pelted. I was stung.

I was being beaten down. My stance tilted

as the earth moved under my feet.

Again I was being forced to yield.

I was so small and this was so big.

Like a hurricane, ALS was knocking me down

and sweeping me away.

I was afraid once more.

Then someone simply took a moment, to just “fly by.”

Maybe it was to only say hello,

perhaps lend a helping hand

or to let me know that they were still there.

So unexpected but dear God, so welcomed.

It was you. How did you know? Did you even realize?

Do you see? You were my gull,

forever soaring right overhead.

Your presence renewed my strength

and rekindled my wonder.

Distanced by lives and by nature, certainly unplanned, we were also woven into a web of life.

Know this my friend: we can weather the storm,

hold fast to our beach

and maintain that abiding peace.

But then we too must part.

May God always bless you

by sending you His gulls during your storm.

In 1970, the first year I taught, one of my students, Danny Conroy had surgery requiring a long convalescence. I became his home tutor and went to his house daily after school. I grew close to his entire family including five siblings. Twenty years later, the district hired one of his younger sisters as an elementary teacher. She was assigned to Dickinson Avenue. Jeannette was an active, environmentally focused teacher making frequent outdoor trips with her class. She often went to the beach and brought back specimens for my classroom’s numerous salt-water aquariums in Habitat House. We chatted many times about the marine environment. We shared a deep love of children and the sea. One day, standing outside the door of my room chatting, I launched into an extemporaneous ocean poem. It evolved into this poem. I dedicate it to Jeannette and her family.

The lesson in this was it may only take a simple ‘Hello, how are you today?’ to make a difference to people barely hanging on. Be proactive and reach out to someone. They may need it beyond your understanding.