Poem Waiting To Happen Poem by Alla Bozarth

Your kid, forty-something, is in jail
again, just when he had a new job
and was going to Texas for management
training and finally had the insurance
to cover his treatment, but then
he got busted. And you, you’re mad
at the world. Your wife loves you
and you’re giving her a rough ride
living with you. You write me saying
the world has gone to hell and where
is God, anyway, you can’t see any sign
of Presence anywhere. I write back, send you
all sorts of inspiring poems, things I think
might help you. But finally (never mind
the letters you send thanking me) I get the lowdown
from the kid’s Mom, and shake my head.
Well, I guess Where is God? is still the question.
You read about the absence and eventual appearance
of God in the concentration camp in Night,
Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust remembrance book.
Everyone’s reading it these days. I see
it’s on the New York Times Best Seller List,
which maybe it wasn’t when it first came out,
at least to this degree. Everyone is wondering,
so I never asked you that essential, obvious question—
what happened to you to make you feel this way?
What happened to you? Your wife says this time
you’re not bailing him out, this tragic boy
named for Christ, who’s been struggling so long
with mental illness beneath or beside the alcohol
and drug addictions. She says she fears for you,
doesn’t know if you’ll make it through.
You didn’t tell me that. I didn’t ask. Now I can just sit
here with you and be still, look at your soul in shreds
and understand how much there is that can’t be said or understood.
I think you should find a strong man,
another Dad, a codependency counselor or priest or friend,
and ask him to walk out to the beach with you. You’re down there
in Georgia, there must be a way to the beach somehow,
all that ocean waiting for your grief. But don’t go alone.
Then you should just let go. Kick through the sand,
throw stones into the water and scream until you can’t even whisper.
Then sink to your knees and cover your head with sand.
Let the tears come. The big waters are waiting for them.
Let your companion hold you. Everything now
is your prayer for your son. Even if you don’t do this,
do it inside your mind and make it your prayer.
Swear and call names and get angry at God and the World
and your Self and your Son and say why, even when
it doesn’t add up, but make sure you spend all you’ve got
on doing this, so that you won’t take any leftovers home.
Home is where your Love is. She’s hurting too.
Your anger doesn’t belong to her. She has her own grief
and way to make it a prayer. It needs to be a surrender prayer.
Not everything gets redeemed in this life. Never mind
that some of the poems seem to say so. Some things only
get redeemed when we find them afterwards, inside God’s closed hand,
not withheld but kept safe until we can finally take our lives back again.
I want you to realize this—God’s hand is sometimes a fist, not to hit us,
but to hold in the Divine Grief (it is so big it might kill us and God too) ,
and to save something for us that we can’t hold onto ourselves.
I want you to know that God is in the mirror, in that wretched face you see,
aged and bloated with tears and ridged with deep crevasses
from where the fiery lava of all your rage came down.
Let go of it now and make God’s face beautiful again...
And God is in jail sitting with his forty-something year old head in his hands
on the edge of a hard narrow bed on top of a rough charcoal blanket.
And God is in the Mother of that man, she who stands beside you now
and puts her hand on your shoulder. Turn to her. Tell her without words
what you’ve done and let yourself be quiet and kind again with her,
with yourself, and wait without waiting for what tomorrow brings.
Do as much of this as necessary again tomorrow or the day after.
Things are going to change, but no one knows when or how.
Let go. Hold onto the hand that slips over your own.
That is your prayer. You are not alone.


This poem is from the book Purgatory Papers by Alla Renée Bozarth,
copyright 2011. All Rights Reserved.