Despite Desolation

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got recovery from desolation? (“I feel desolate”)

I believe individuals, and entire societies too, can recover from emotionally (or physically) desolating events. Perhaps even become “whole.” Just the other day I read the memoirs of the man who co-founded Second Cup, with money he made in sales while attending recovery meetings. I learned the fellow had first been a homeless alcoholic street bum for years. People are not leopards; people can “hit bottom,” find their soul, and leap up higher than any beast. 

Of course, then the man lived forever “in recovery.” Joyous, grateful and cautious. 

Maybe for us mortals, becoming “whole” is only an abstraction, an ideal never achieved here on Earth. Still, to live is to try. History tells us that people in a community, even after fire and famine, or drought and population recede, will still seek out a time and place to sing together. As the bumper sticker on a time traveling DeLorean car reads, “If I can’t sing and dance, I don’t want to be part of your community.”

Here are two serious poems:

For this poem, you may recall the narrator found his sisters. At first they survived in their old house, later they joined a community. 

On Brighton Beach

I know my sisters would understand

me taking time to go see where we 

had holidays at the seashore.

A lost orange shovel lies abraded on the beach.

I stand before a slate horizon.

Dark waves swoosh flecks of oil,

and swirl onto the grey sand.

Gulls arc in the cold sky,

and scream to each other.

People are nowhere.

Soon, with Martians gone,

people will come flowing in.

My hands are cold.

People of tomorrow,

as seen on my mind’s TV,

won’t warm me today.

Gulls screech on the chilly wind.

In this poem, we are told the narrator is “a stranger.” How so? Is he passing through, perhaps a tradesman, a journalist, or merely a man with a journal? Or has his emotional desolation, remembered in italics, made him forever a stranger on earth?

In the Music Hall (By day a community centre)

Outside,

it is too dark to work.

Inside,

we sit wearing sweaters.

Onstage,

Joan Keats plays guitar.

Folks are happy.

Among hard working yard and field growers

I am a stranger in a strange town,

with a smile

deep inside me

and my notebook plunked on the table

before me.

Easy to pen lofty revelations

while everyone else

holds a stylish Mona Lisa smile,

as Joan’s grace notes

like champagne bubbles rise to the rafters.

Folks are happy.

Death on three legs walked past me

I was spared and my uncle was not.

A file of cars was immolated

They were active and I was not.

A church was filled with bodies

They prayed and I did not.

If there’s an answer

I know it not.

Here I can watch and feel. 

Joan stabs a frown in my direction,

“Hey!” Why the notebook?

“This isn’t the Oxford Library.”

My mouth holds a straight-line repose.

At last

I stab a smile back.

I guess I don’t do the Mona Lisa thing.

Folks are happy.

Sean Crawford

December

Camrose

2019