Now we live in cubicles voluminous
We cannot kiss a friend to say goodbye
Though some may see or hear the numinous
While we live as separate as our perfume is
God is unaffected by walls numerous
Can visit prisoners without need for lies
Divert lonely people being humorous
As we ‘re locked so separate can you live with us?
We cannot kiss the cat to say goodbye

From the miles of flatness and the fens

Comes the hill where this Cathedral stands

Everyone can see this floodlit site

When the moon is out and there is night.

I saw it through the window as I turned

It’l struck me down with beauty never earned.

As I lay surprised upon the stair

I absorbed the beauty I saw there.

Should we worship beauty such as this?

It strikes us with a hammer not a kiss

“One thinks of Isaiah — ”Thou hast drunken the dregs of the cup of trembling” — and of Psalm 137: ”By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept as we thought of Zion.” The great poems remind us that grief cannot be avoided, nor forgotten, but can be incorporated into a deeper understanding of the human condition, as in Emily Dickinson’s ”After great pain, a formal feeling comes”:

This is the Hour of Lead —

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow —

First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go —

It is that union of experience, insight and the simple beauty of language that helps us to give our own grief a name, that gives us a kind of company, that extends a wise hand. Many experiencing intense, even unbearable personal loss have found redemptive meaning in the famous poem Ben Jonson wrote in 1603 at the death of his son, the one in which he declares, ”My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.” There is no full consolation for a parent who loses a child, and indeed Jonson does not offer consolation. But he at least gives a form to what most of us only dimly understand: that the source of grief is the intensity of the hopes that have been lost, and that without the possibility of grief there would have been no joy.”

I

Oh holy light that held me in your gaze

That spoke to me in words without a sound

A holy light, a person hidden away

I did not seek and yet I have been found.

When I was trapped alone with my  numbed heart

When nobody could touch me with their hand

When in bleak despair I sat apart

By your holy light I have been found.

Although you did not speak I heard your words

I heard them all and yet there was no noise

How did you convey them so I heard?

The senses were conjoined, became one voice

I thought I was near death and yet I lived

Despair is long yet graceful are its gifts.