What if it's just black?
Good morning! I’m sharing a poem I wrote from this thin edge between my belief and my agnosticism. It’s inspired by several people in my life who believe that Love governs all of existence, and also by our friends’ daughter who, when she was contemplating life after death at the age of four, matter-of-factly said, “What if it’s just black?”
I believe Love will greet us at the end of it all. But also, I wonder, what if it’s just black? How to prove one or the other? The fact that we are capable of love, can feel and give and receive it, you might offer as evidence of Love’s reign over a kingdom encompassing us all. Yet what if, at this kingdom’s border, Love concedes to nothing? Not as in Love conquers all and concedes to nothing, But as in, Love concedes, and it concedes to nothing. What if, at the end of Love, there is just this — black? As if death might not be the glory of Lux Perpetua but a crushing under heavy weight, slow-smothering warmth of thick blankets in the pitch of a known room, needing nothing. As if this is somehow helpful. As if I can tell which senses I will retain, which I must shed or might gain when all is done, whether, given these senses, I will know the difference between an all-ending darkness or all-embracing love, whether it is darkness embracing or love ending all, because what is darkness or love, minus sensation? This is not useful. It’s a game I play in ink and paper, Latinate words in a cloud. Still I wake daily, pour black coffee into a mug, wait in the stillness before dawn and choose how I might greet my children when they wake and come downstairs. How to make the silence of this darkness its own form of embrace when they arrive. How to form a Good morning out of the dark.
POETRY BROADSIDES
I still have a few dozen broadside prints of my poem “A Prayer On The Feast of Saint Francis.” My sister Missy Rich did the artwork, and you can order one on my website or at the upcoming Wiseblood reading on March 3rd. (Details below.)
Missy lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. She recently offered the broadsides for sale in her own community and shared a note about what the poem has meant to her. I enjoyed reading her reflection so much I wanted to share it with you, as well:
When I started teaching at Charlotte Catholic High School five years ago, I was told I was to begin every class period with prayer. Any prayer of the teacher's choosing. So naturally, I crowd-sourced via social media to gather a rolodex of prayers to cycle through. My brother sent me this one. At the time I didn't know he had written it. I read it to my students every quarter for four years -- five periods a day, four times a year, for four years. I could almost recite it from memory. I was partial to it despite not knowing the author's identity. And every time I read it in class, there was an audible reaction from at least one student. Mind you, these are teenagers that are used to numbing out to Hail Mary Full of Grace... seven times a day. To hear from a teacher's mouth "pray for us you holy fool" almost demanded a reaction. It sparked conversation as well as, I hoped, questions that were perhaps never voiced but carried through their day.
When Andrew approached me about this project, I was already so intimately connected to the poem that it felt like an easy Yes. The poem offered an abundance of imagery through his words that I could have easily pulled into the illustration. I wanted to capture the heaviness of our human condition, the toiling and labor of our days, and at the same time speak visually of the hope and lightness that the prayer offers. Each stanza juxtaposes us and them, us and them. Us, the ones who can't quite figure it out. Them, the One who whispers to us through the Earth with an appeal to just look up. We are connected in ways we don’t fully comprehend and disconnect ourselves sometimes without even realizing it.
