One little old lady
Little old lady
Topping eighty
Rucksacked
Runs the roads
Faster than I can
(that not to say much)
Towing a little old dog,
Scrawned in her image
She was a regularity
On our walk to school
Then she was missing,
One month, two
This morning,
Sunbright,
We saw again,
Summer shorts,
No rucksack,
No dog
Evidently,
He could not keep up
He said to himself
She’ll run for ever
Let her
I’ve had enough
I’m packing in
Another little old lady
We saw her,
Constant as Kant on his daily walk
Telling the people of Konigsberg that
When I turn the next corner, the time
Will be exactly five o’clock
She did not perambulate
Or philosophise, as far
As we could tell
But she brushed her rooms,
And her garden path,
And the hedged pavement fronting her home
Aged, not very strong
She tickled and winkled at stray leaves
Shepherding them back under the branches
Ready for the breeze to untidy all her work
What was this old lady doing
Inside this repeated futility?
Suffering Sisyphean punishment
Trapped in demential repetition
Or dignity of habit,
Keeping her step polished,
No waning in face of imminent ending,
Faithful in weakness?
Then we saw her,
Now we don’t,
Yet somehow still
Her path is clear
Twiglet
The boy of two years
Crouched in the hedge
Raises his arm
Straight towards the overlooking mother
Tall at the pavement’s edge
Hand on buggy
In his fist,
A dried twig of splintered pine,
A foot-long upright with two side shoots,
Making a large F
A finding proffered for maternal admiration,
Insignificance transformed in the grip of attention,
Rubbish made treasure,
By the child’s choosing.
N also walks this pavement
Cheerily to school
Here he has collected conkers in hundreds,
Odd shaped stones,
Rusty washers.
Here he has counted slugs against more numerous snails –
On this pavement he has been growing up
Through four years
So he edits out mere twigs
Leaving them invisible by acquired indifference
His mind on greater things like Ugio cards
So is this schooled boy now
Slipping down Wordsworth’s slope
To the dull melancholy of adult loss
Comforted only by vague intimations of immortality?
Faith forbids such fatalistic imposition:
N and friends day after day
Take up scorched planks
(Left from the shed that nearly set the house afire
When a dustbin melted from the hot ashes it was not made to hold)
Without nails to engineer a den in a tree
With uncooperatively angled branches
Playing in hope, seeing the invisible.
The stuff is bigger now than a toddler’s twig:
The spirit, experimental, wondering, hoping, is still the same.
Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour!
At least you offer an alternative to Wordsworth.
Not the disaster of the ageing individual
But ‘Man’s first disobedience’ and
death brought into the ‘world’
‘till one greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat’ –
All this appeared in his ‘advent’rous song’ pursuing
‘things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme’
reaching its end with ‘our grand Parents’ expelled from Paradise,
At which
‘some natural tears they dropp’d, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
They, hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.’
They were like the boy,
Crouching in the hedge,
The world all before him,
The world in a dessicated splinter
A hand stretched out in giving and receiving
Living the paradox,
Hand in hand, yet taking a solitary way.
Adam and Eve grew up quickly,
Sin, guilt, shame, loss is a terrible maker
Of adults rich with experience –
Too rich to enter the Kingdom of God.
Can tears for this disaster be wiped so soon?
Could the expulsion from the Garden be so full of grace,
That adulthood is given to them as truly childlike being,
So ‘the world is all before them’
Open to their choosing
Within the care of God?
There is a child in the midst
Of these fallen men and women,
Leaving paradise toiled, coiled, soiled, in experience,
They are lightened by the promised greater Man
Bringing ‘the wholly new thing’
to those who ‘have nothing behind them’
‘empty pages’ like the child set in the midst,
tears wiped soon, open to life.1 K Barth The Christian Life 1981 p 81, in the section on the children, a note on Matt.11.25/Luke 10.21: the revelation is ‘made exclusively to babes’ (who are ‘obviously not to be construed as stupid or muddleheaded people’). ‘The wholly new thing that has come in Jesus is open only to those people who are an adequate match, who are open to it, because they have nothing behind them, because they are not stopped or blocked up against it by any intellectual, moral, aesthetic, or religious a priori that they have brought with them, because they are empty pages. This is plainly the point of the story about the child that Jesus set in the midst of his disputing disciples….
…’the fools of Paul are no more [stupid or muddleheaded] than are the babes and children of the Gospels. What distinguishes them from others is the ability to accept the radical new beginning which is made with men, apart from any enterprise of their own, in the gospel of the Father and the Son, in the Word of the cross. What distinguishes them is the willingness to begin at this new beginning…’
Notes
- 1K Barth The Christian Life 1981 p 81, in the section on the children, a note on Matt.11.25/Luke 10.21: the revelation is ‘made exclusively to babes’ (who are ‘obviously not to be construed as stupid or muddleheaded people’). ‘The wholly new thing that has come in Jesus is open only to those people who are an adequate match, who are open to it, because they have nothing behind them, because they are not stopped or blocked up against it by any intellectual, moral, aesthetic, or religious a priori that they have brought with them, because they are empty pages. This is plainly the point of the story about the child that Jesus set in the midst of his disputing disciples….
…’the fools of Paul are no more [stupid or muddleheaded] than are the babes and children of the Gospels. What distinguishes them from others is the ability to accept the radical new beginning which is made with men, apart from any enterprise of their own, in the gospel of the Father and the Son, in the Word of the cross. What distinguishes them is the willingness to begin at this new beginning…’