Give Thanks: a Resource for Live and Virtual Family Holiday Gatherings

POEMS The sound of that relaxed alluring blow, A Thanksgiving Poem Its co-opted and obliterated echo, Paul Laurence Dunbar Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen, Taught me between the hammer and the block The sun hath shed its kindly light, To face the music. Teach me now to listen, Our harvesting is gladly o’er To strike it rich behind the linear black. Our fields have felt no killing blight, Our bins are filled with goodly store. 1 From pestilence, fire, flood, and sword A cobble thrown a hundred years ago We have been spared by thy decree, Keeps coming at me, the first stone And now with humble hearts, O Lord, Aimed at a great-grandmother's turncoat brow. We come to pay our thanks to thee. The pony jerks and the riot's on. She's crouched low in the trap We feel that had our merits been Running the gauntlet that first Sunday The measure of thy gifts to us, Down the brae to Mass at a panicked gallop. We erring children, born of sin, He whips on through the town to cries of 'Lundy!' Might not now be rejoicing thus. Call her 'The Convert'. 'The Exogamous Bride'. No deed of our hath brought us grace; Anyhow, it is a genre piece When thou were nigh our sight was dull, Inherited on my mother's side We hid in trembling from thy face, And mine to dispose with now she's gone. But thou, O God, wert merciful. Instead of silver and Victorian lace, The exonerating, exonerated stone. Thy mighty hand o’er all the land Hath still been open to bestow 2 Those blessings which our wants demand Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone. From heaven, whence all blessings flow. The china cups were very white and big— An unchipped set with sugar bowl and jug. Thou hast, with ever watchful eye, The kettle whistled. Sandwich and tea scone Looked down on us with holy care, Were present and correct. In case it run, And from thy storehouse in the sky The butter must be kept out of the sun. Hast scattered plenty everywhere. And don't be dropping crumbs. Don't tilt your chair. Then lift we up our songs of praise Don't reach. Don't point. To thee, O Father, good and kind; Don't make noise when you stir. To thee we consecrate our days; Be thine the temple of each mind. It is Number 5, New Row, Land of the Dead, Where grandfather is rising from his place With incense sweet our thanks ascend; With spectacles pushed back on a clean bald head Before thy works our powers pall; To welcome a bewildered homing daughter Though we should strive years without end, Before she even knocks. 'What's this? What's this?' We could not thank thee for them all. And they sit down in the shining room together. 3 Clearances When all the others were away at Mass Seamus Heaney I was all hers as we peeled potatoes. They broke the silence, let fall one by one In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984 Like solder weeping off the soldering iron: Cold comforts set between us, things to share She taught me what her uncle once taught her: Gleaming in a bucket of clean water. How easily the biggest coal block split And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes If you got the grain and hammer angled right. From each other's work would bring us to our senses. So while the parish priest at her bedside And rubrics for the blessing of the font. Went hammer and tongs As the hind longs for the streams, so my soul. at the prayers for the dying Dippings. Towellings. The water breathed on. And some were responding and some crying The water mixed with chrism and with oil. I remembered her head bent towards my head, Cruet tinkle. Formal incensation Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives— And the psalmist's outcry taken up with pride: Never closer the whole rest of our lives. Day and night my tears have been my bread. 4 7 Fear of affectation made her affect In the last minutes he said more to her Inadequacy whenever it came to Almost than in all their life together. Pronouncing words 'beyond her'.Bertold Brek. 'You'll be in New Row on Monday night She'd manage something hampered and askew And I'll come up for you and you'll be glad Every time, as if she might betray When I walk in the door . Isn't that right?' The hampered and inadequate by too His head was bent down to her propped-up head. Well-adjusted a vocabulary. She could not hear but we were overjoyed. With more challenge than pride, He called her good and girl. Then she was dead, she'd tell me, 'You The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned Know all them things.' And we all knew one thing by being there. So I governed my tongue The space we stood around had been emptied In front of her, a genuinely well- Into us to keep, it penetrated Adjusted adequate betrayal Clearances that suddenly stood open. Of what I knew better. I'd naw and aye High cries were felled And decently relapse into the wrong and a pure change happened. Grammar which kept us allied and at bay. 8 5 I thought of walking round and round a space The cool that came off sheets just off the line Utterly empty, utterly a source Made me think the damp must still be in them Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place But when I took my corners of the linen In our front hedge above the wallflowers. And pulled against her, first straight down the The white chips jumped hem/And then diagonally, and jumped and skited high. then flapped and shook I heard the hatchet's differentiated The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh They made a dried-out undulating thwack. And collapse of what luxuriated So we'd stretch and fold, Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all. and end up hand to hand For a split second as if nothing had happened For nothing had that had not always happened The Peace of Wild Things Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, Wendell Berry Coming close again by holding back When despair for the world grows in me In moves where I was x and she was o and I wake in the night at the least sound Inscribed in sheets she'd sewn from ripped-out in fear of what my life and my children’s flour sacks. lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake 6 rests in his beauty on the water, In the first flush of the Easter holidays and the great heron feeds. The ceremonies during Holy Week I come into the peace of wild things Were highpoints of ourSons and Lovers phase. who do not tax their lives with forethought The midnight fire. The paschal candlestick. of grief. I come into the presence of still water. Elbow to elbow, glad to be kneeling next And I feel above me the day-blind stars To each other up there near the front waiting with their light. For a time Of the packed church, we would follow the text I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. If what you fear in death Morning in a New Land is punishment beyond this, you need not Mary Oliver fear death: how many times must I destroy my own creation In trees still dripping night some nameless birds to teach you Woke, shook out their arrowy wings, and sang, this is your punishment: Slowly, like finches sifting through dream. The pink sun fell, like glass, into the fields. with one gesture I established you Two chestnuts, and a dapple gray, in time and in paradise. Their shoulders wet with light, their dark hair streaming, El viento despierta, Climbed the hill. The last mist fell away. barre los pensamientos de mi frente Otoño y me suen la luz que sonríe para nadie: Octavio Paz And under the trees, beyond time’s brittle drift, spende I stood like Adam in his lonely garden Autumn ¡cuánta belleza suelta! On the first morning, shaken out of sleep, Otoño: entre tus manos frías Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves, el mundo llamea. Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift. The wind wakes, sweeps the thoughts from my mind and hangs me A Timbered Choir in a light that smiles for no one: what random beauty! from The Sabbath Poems Autumn: between your cold hands Wendell Berry the world flames. Whatever is foreseen in joy Must be lived out from day to day. Selections of Rumi Vision held open in the dark Jelaluddin Balkkhi (Rumi) By our ten thousand days of work. Harvest will fill the barn; for that Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to The hand must ache, the face must sweat. Don’t try to see through the distances. That’s not for human beings. Move within, And yet no leaf or grain is filled But don’t move the way fear makes you move. By work of ours; the field is tilled And left to grace. That we may reap, Today, like every other day, we wake up empty Great work is done while we're asleep.

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