QCE52B NIE Lit 2018

You ask for a poem.  I offer you a blade of grass.  You say it is not good enough.  You ask for a poem.  I say this blade of grass will do.  It has dressed itself in frost,  It is more immediate  Than any image of my making.  You say it is not a poem,  It is a blade of grass and grass  Is not quite good enough.  I offer you a blade of grass.  You are indignant.  You say it is too easy to offer grass.  It is absurd.  Anyone can offer a blade of grass.  You ask for a poem.  And so I write you a tragedy about  How a blade of grass  Becomes more and more difficult to offer,  And about how as you grow older  A blade of grass  Becomes more difficult to accept.

After a while you learn the subtle difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul and you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning and company doesn’t always mean security. And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts and presents aren’t promises and you begin to accept your defeats with your head up and your eyes ahead with the grace of woman, not the grief of a child and you learn to build all your roads on today because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight. After a while you learn that even sunshine burns if you get too much so you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. And you learn that you really can endure you really are strong you really do have worth and you learn and you learn with every goodbye, you learn…

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day – A sunny day with leaves just turning, The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play  Your first game of football, then, like a satellite  Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away Behind a scatter of boys. I can see You walking away from me towards the school  With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free  Into a wilderness, the gait of one Who finds no path where the path should be. That hesitant figure, eddying away Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem, Has something I never quite grasp to convey About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching  Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay. I have had worse partings, but none that so  Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly  Saying what God alone could perfectly show –  How selfhood begins with a walking away,  And love is proved in the letting go. ...