Happiness and Let Evening Come (Jane Kenyon)

I've been thinking a great deal about the events that have impacted my life and my family's and friends' lives in the last 6 months, and there are some unifying themes.  One that I've already talked about, but I continue to examine is the fact that after bad things happen, the steady drum of time continues.  We can't affect it at all, even though it seems that we should.  Now looking at this, I realize how much this inexorable ticking of the clock saves us too.  At some point, we have to get up and return to our lives, no matter how unbelievable the loss.  Even more unbelievable to me is the fact that happiness might just creep in occasionally, even when it seems as if it can never happen, should never happen, is so wrong to happen, and yet happen it does.  And thank goodness it does!  I don't mean unending happiness, but a glimpse, a laugh together, a smile about the incredibly impossible sadness and loss we feel together...and then perhaps over time, slowly, it isn't so impossible to deal with all the time.  The other thing that is so clear is that we all need comfort, to be comforted, to be touched.  Ok, that's obvious, isn't it?  Well, consider the SICU, the tubes, the lights,the disorientation and it is easy to forget to hug the person who isn't really able to say, "please come over here and hug me because I'm terrified and lonely and scared and in pain." Consider the caretaker who has to deal with the sick person's frustration with being sick and their short temper when they don't feel good, etc.  One of the wonderful people in my poetry class was talking about the poet, Jane Kenyon, and I poked around here and there and found a few pieces that are directly relevant to everything I've just said, and they say it with more depth and fewer words!  you just have to love poetry!
try these:

Happiness (Jane Kenyon)

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what

was lost, and take from its place the finest

garment, which you saved for an occasion

you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

to know that you were not abandoned,

that happiness saved its most extreme form

for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never

knew about, who flies a single-engine plane

onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes

into town, and inquires at every door

until he finds you asleep midafternoon

as you so often are during the unmerciful

hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.

It comes to the woman sweeping the street

with a birch broom, to the child

whose mother has passed out from drink.

It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing

a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,

and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots

in the night.

       It even comes to the boulder

in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,

to rain falling on the open sea,

to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

Let Evening Come (Jane Kenyon)

Let the light of late afternoon

shine through chinks in the barn, moving

up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing

as a woman takes up her needles

and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned

in long grass. Let the stars appear

and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.

Let the wind die down. Let the shed

go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop

in the oats, to air in the lung

let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't

be afraid. God does not leave us

comfortless, so let evening come