When I consider how my light is spent
When I write these posts I do a search for poems and songs that reflect the overall mood, that becomes the title and the soundtrack above and beneath the words. Usually it’s easy. The canon of well-known poems and songs are extensive and pretty much cover all the human emotional and physical experiences. We are simple creatures, after all.
This time, though, I googled “energy poems” and got an spew of unintelligible garbage. It reminded me of a high school poetry lesson when we had to write a poem in the style of Carl Sandburg’s Chicago and everyone did a great job. It’s not hard because you can just pick a place and write BING BONG BOOM and the words just growl off the page and you have a faux Carl Sandburg (I really like Chicago and he’s a level above don’t get me wrong). The next day, however, we had to do Emily Dickenson and we all floundered.
“Hope is the thing with feathers”
How can you make a high school rendition of that?
“I taste a liquor never-brewed in tankards made of pearl”
Christ.
Anyway, I switched my search from “energy poems” to “light poems” and got a nice John Milton verse to contemplate.
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
John Milton!! He wrote the (admittedly super long) poem that explained the Fall so much better than the Bible, so that anyone, really, could contemplate the moral lessons 1600 years after the fact. It all boils down to controlling your situation so you can make the best possible choices. He was a Puritan, the same people who eventually came to Boston and formed the basics of our dour and charitable political structure here today. And while the kindergarten teachers talking about making the right choices don’t always make me resonate with emotions about Paradise Lost it all comes from the same moral vault.
We have a pocket device you might even be reading this essay on that connects us to the wisdom of the ages but mostly we play games and watch snippets of Bravo Real Housewives…stop, I know, don’t even go there. No judgment. Humans are just who we are. Disappointing, often, sublime, sometimes, worthy of love and respect, always.
“Good times for a change
See the luck I’ve had can make a good man turn bad”
An announcement, a surprise…I have energy now. Today in addition to clinic I did most of the dishes and cooked lunch and vacuumed the sun room and yesterday I cleaned out most of the fridge. I can take the older kid’s prom dress to the cleaners and write the necessary emails to get music lessons for the younger kid. I can live my life and I don’t have to hunker down and think about it too much and let the entropy take over, because that’s what happens when you are sick. Entropy and disorder.
Energy. Fission, fusion, life, whatever, we don’t have good poetry for that yet because its both too ordinary and also too new. Perhaps we do and I’ve never seen it because I’m not that worldly, really, and you can tell me a good poem about coming back to life with energy. I’d love to see it.
I never told you how I solved the problem of the fevers.
I will, eventually. But it’s not really the lesson to be learned because it’s just the chance good luck. So you wait. And so do I, because even now I’m not sure if I got it all wrong.