I really enjoy reading a good blog writer but think most blogs writers aren’t very good. I imagine anything I write will be tossed in the electronic dumpster. But I wanted a place to save the good stuff I read, photos or paintings that strike me, poems that sing and say what is in my own heart… even if someone else wrote the words or saw the vision first. This is more like a mosaic of influences on my life in my “Rowing Toward God”. It will most likely be more like a private journal, perhaps that is how most blogs actually function for their writers, good ones and poor ones like me.
Anne Sexton was a great poet, someone said she was like person with no skin, no protective layer, just a mass of exposed nerve cells, she felt every pain and could write it. She was followed by the Dark Cloud of Depression. Finally she killed herself, in 1974.
Sexton carefully laid out the themes of her collections of poetry. One collection she made was published after her death in 1975 and it explores the theme of her search for God. It’s title is “An Awful Rowing Toward God’.
The poetry in this book, like the poet in her life, feels every pain in that search for God. It startles me with it’s brutal honesty. And I have to admit… it so often says what I feel about myself or know to be true for others.
I thank God that my rowing has not been as awful as Sexton’s, but rowing is still hard work.
Here are the first and last poems of Sexton’s book,
AN AWFUL ROWING TOWARD GOD.
ROWING
A story, a story!
(Let it go. Let it come.)
I was stamped out like a Plymouth fender
into this world.
First came the crib
with it’s glacial bars.
Then dolls
and the devotion to their plastic mouths.
Then there was school,
the little straight rows of chairs,
blotting my name over and over,
but undersea all the time,
a stranger whose elbows wouldn’t work.
Then there was life
with it’s cruel houses
and people who seldom touched –
though touch is all –
but I grew,
like a pig in a trenchcoat I grew,
and then there were many strange apparitions,
the nagging rain, the sun turning into poison
and all of that, saws working through my heart,
but I grew, I grew,
and God was there like an island I had not rowed to,
still ignorant of Him, my arms and my legs worked,
and I grew, I grew,
I wore rubies and bought tomatoes
and now, in my middle age,
about nineteen in the head I’d say,
I am rowing, I am rowing
though the oarlocks stick and are rusty
and the sea blinks and rolls
like a worried eyeball,
but I am rowing, I am rowing,
though the wind pushes me back
and I know that that island will not be perfect,
it will have the flaws of life,
the absurdities of the dinner table,
but there will be a door
and I will open it
and I will get rid of the rat inside of me,
the gnawing pestilential rat.
God will take it with his two hands
and embrace it.
As the African says:
This is my tale which I have told,
if it be sweet, if it be not sweet,
take somewhere else and let some return to me.
This story ends with me still rowing.
THE ROWING ENDETH
I’m mooring my rowboat
at the dock of the island called God.
This dock is made in the shape of a fish
and there are many boats moored
at many different docks.
“It’s okay.” I say to myself,
with blisters that broke and healed
and broke and healed –
saving themselves over and over.
And salt sticking to my face and arms like
a glue-skin pocked with grains of tapioca.
I empty myself from my wooden boat
and onto the flesh of The Island.
“On with it!” He says and thus
we squat on the rocks by the sea
and play – can it be true –
a game of poker.
He calls me.
I win because I hold a royal straight flush.
He wins because He holds five aces,
A wild card had been announced
but I had not heard it
being in such a state of awe
when He took out the cards and dealt.
As he plunks down His five aces
and I am still grinning at my royal flush,
He starts to laugh,
and laughter rolling like a hoop out of His mouth
and into mine,
and such laughter that He doubles right over me
laughing a Rejoice-Chorus at our two triumphs.
Then I laugh, the fishy dock laughs
the sea laughs. The Island laughs.
The Absurd laughs.
Dearest dealer,
I with my royal straight flush,
love you so for your wild card,
that untamable, eternal, gut-driven ha-ha
and lucky love.
Rowing Toward God 