This column first appeared in December 2009.
I was an adult student at Indiana University Southeast when Dr. Richard Brengle, my English Lit professor, called out to me as I passed his office.
“Come here,” he said. “I want you to hear this.”
Dr. Brengle had recognized in me a love of literature and poetry. He had helped to focus my aimless drifting through the University Division on English Literature, and introduced me to a new world of poetry. On this day, he read a poem to me, and the richness of his voice in the delivery of that poem is still as warm in my memory as it was on that day.
“Isn’t that beautiful?” he asked me, when finished with the reading. That poem was “A Blessing,” by James Wright.
The first three definitions of “bless” in the Oxford English Dictionary have the words “consecrate,” “divine,” “holy,” and “prayer,” within the descriptions. The fourth definition is mine:
“4- Confer well-being upon, make happy…”
Our lives are a series of collisions, great and small, and course corrections, tall grasses and waterways, and tunnels, from which we pop into rain, wind, snow and sunlight. Wisps and whispers stream behind us as we live our way to the end of our lives: that was well done, that was not and that . . . that thing, was why we kept moving into our future. Within each of those things was the richness of opportunity to “confer well-being … (and) make happy” the people we met in the tunnels and on the waterways and in the collisions of our living.
Some would contend that our murmured “blessings” return to their intended targets; I will not argue against that notion. But I do believe that the corporeal hand we extend, the heart that we touch, will warm to the kindness and intimacy of the gesture. Convert the thought into action.
For some years, at holiday time, I have been sharing James Wright’s poem with friends and associates. I send it by e-mail, and title the missive “A Blessing.” The poem has no holiday theme, and confuses some who receive it. Some have looked for, and found, religious significance in the title; others have delighted in the simple beauty of the poem; still others have mused on my motive for sending it, since the poem has no holiday theme. We’ve become used to some fanfare attendant to the presentation of gifts, some explanation of the reason and the cause, some tacit understanding of the season.
The media does not attend the announcements of our generosities, for we do not announce them. We do these things not for “the strut and trade of charms/ On the ivory stages,” but for the satisfaction of having conferred a gift upon someone who may have recently emerged from a tunnel, into the sunlight of our sharing.
My sharing of that poem, that moment of joy, has been returned to me many times, although my intention is to give, and not to receive. But when one of my co-workers wrote to me that the poem had been read at his wedding, I smiled in silent delight.
I will not recount James Wright’s poem here, for the poem was just part of the blessing of the moment. Dr. Brengle knew his audience (though I will never know whether he understood the impact of that impulsive moment of outreach on me, that small, soft collision and course correction). But I give you the last three lines:
“Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.”
(“A Blessing” by James Wright can be found in the volume The Branch Will Not Break.)
cjon3acd@att.net