Today’s Word from Laura Canby…
The poet T.S. Eliot penned in his epic poem ‘The Waste Land’ (written after the 1918 flu pandemic) that ‘April is the cruelest month.’
For me, February– ironically, the shortest month – seems interminably long and worthy of holding that title. It is during this dreary winter month that I am most tired of the rain, grey clouds and cold.
February seems to me to be just a slow, long slog of a month.
What’s called for is a stick-to-itiveness and a just-get-it-done attitude that I witness almost daily in our church and community since the pandemic restrictions set in.
I am reminded of a poem I wrote for a friend of mine who embodies this attitude year ‘round. She fights the good fight of daily sobriety after having spent her 20s and 30s in a refuge of numbness after some serious life blows and chronic pain.
Fortunately, she regained her life and marriage, and has been sober for nearly 30 years. Her common courage and everyday valor – along with that of others I witness – continue to inspire me with strength through this pandemic and its longest, shortest month.
Common Courage and Everyday Valor
The poets write of gallant knights
and daring fights to death.
Of fresh-faced lads in drabs
of green or gray or blue,
who followed columned corps
of countless others to their final rest,
— all the while believing in
that oft-recited call to glory
“Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.”*
And I suppose, as heroes go,
these do deserve some lasting tribute,
a testament to their bravery and woe
—as if stone could ever trade for blood
or chiseled marble compensate for loss
of loves and lives and joys,
as earth returns to earth
and memory fades to fables
of steadfast soldier-men and
bound-for-glory boys.
But even so, I do believe
of equal merit mention should be made
to those who walk still in our midst
without benefit of praise or accolade,
but who, nonetheless, with quiet,
common courage and everyday valor,
slowly, steadily, make their way
half-determined, half-resigned
to fight on another day.
Whether it be souls tempest-tossed,
adrift in loneliness and pain,
perhaps entrapped in guilt, regret,
or a thousand inner, unknown chains.
Or whether it be some other thing
that holds them in an icy clasp
—some seductive drug or drink—
luring, pulling, dragging them
closer to the brink of nothingness.
Yet still, they struggle on and on
to outlast, outlive, outwill,
delivering strength born breach
of weakness; nurturing warmth
beyond life’s chill.
— Laura Canby
*Latin: “It is sweet and fitting to die _
for one’s country_.”
