I read some

...more last night of The Things They Carried
and remembered why I had to reread it.

There is simply no way to know the things people
carry around with them every day. Even when they
open themselves as much as they can, you can't know
what they really carry. Tim O'Brien opens himself
so honestly and matter-of-factly that sometimes
it's hard to think how much he carries around with him.


I can't believe I have been working for a month now.
It seems like years some days and like it was just
yesterday I started this journey.

I have been asked in the past why I've never written
anything about my work. I've always felt it would
be such a violation. And I wonder how the WCWs
made their peace as they wrote about some of the
experiences. Even though I would never be specific,
I would know in my mind how much I would think I
was violating some trust. It's been equally hard
to write about my family. Though there are many
stories that many days find themselves shaping
into a poem of sorts, I can't do it. So my focus has been
rather narrow and self-absorbed, my work filled with
banalities of my day.

I guess what I am thinking and feeling is that I can never
give myself over completely to the muse. Too much conflict.
Too much truth to be told that is, perhaps, better left unsaid.

Sometimes I feel I am just conceding to the nagging voice
that continues to say You have no talent. Let those who do
write the words and you just revel in them, swallow them,
cry over them, laugh over them, hug them tight to your chest
because you know they speak your langauge. Maybe that
is just the way it is to be.

And if it is to be, then just keep reading and loving and feeling.

Here's one:


Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks

I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years. . . .

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper. . . .

When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me. . . .

I am food on the prisoner's plate. . . .

I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills. . . .

I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden. . . .

I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge. . . .

I am the heart contracted by joy. . .
the longest hair, white
before the rest. . . .

I am there in the basket of fruit
presented to the widow. . . .

I am the musk rose opening
unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. . . .

I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name. . . .

Jane Kenyon