Bereft of Words

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This morning I rose a bit later than usual, bereft of the darkness in which I usually write.  Bereft.  Funny that word would come to me, a truth uninvited but welcome.  The poems of Evelyn Coffey left to us when she died included a few fragments, one of which has remained with me, haunting and consoling, for these dozen years: “I am bereft of words as she is bereft of breath.”  It was apparently part of a note of condolence, start of a note of condolence to a friend on the death of a friend.  I still wonder whether the poet, bereft of words, ever completed that note, or rather fell into her helpless faith, her faithful helplessness, trusting instead a dozen or two chaplets, those little rosaries she’d say on her porch. 

“You wish the morning would never come.”  One of the guys at the homeless shelter came to mind, a tall, quiet, worn kind of guy whose gray hair brings truth to an almost boyish face, its lines showing only up close.  I had asked the group to make a list of feelings that homeless people have, for a project that we’re working on together.    His phrase lifted itself from the rest of the responses coming from the group, as if all the rest were pressing the keys of typewriters and he was pressing the keys of a piano.  I looked into his gray eyes and repeated the words, asking him if he ever wrote poetry.  He said no, but was literally lifted by my question, becoming more eager, more present.  We talked about what night was, and what morning was.  Night is the time when no one sees us, when nothing is expected of us, when we are not judged or threatened.  With morning comes visibility; with morning come the expectation of some usefulness, and the threat of failure, of failing even ourselves.

We fall asleep, blessed release from the expectations of others, of ourselves.  We awaken, alerted to watchfulness, to response, to responsibility.  This morning as I awakened in the light, I found that I was prey to my expectations of myself.  I rose to the sounds of the orchestra in my brain tuning their instruments, the runner in me lacing on my shoes.  Action drew me forward out of the eddy of darkness into the current of the day.  It is as if I write with one hand and hold on, with the other, to the darkness of memory, the departed, of which I am bereft.  The word bereavement, used almost exclusively in regard to the loss of a friend or loved one in death, is from the Old English meaning to be robbed, to have something snatched from us suddenly. 

When we are robbed, when something is snatched from us, we have a natural response to look into our hand from which it was grabbed, or into the pocket.  In our minds, it is there, in its place.  We are immobilized by our reliance on its being in its usual place.  And so Evelyn, the poet, the woman of words of consolation and grace, had her gift of language snatched from her by the swiftness and thoroughness of death.  The words were not where she reached for them.  And so this morning I ramble in this twilight, this blog not flowing in the freedom of the night, the night without its visibility, the night without its expectations, its demands.  Perhaps that is why it is in the twilight, the minute before we waken, that dreams weave, with their seemingly unrelated stands of memory, a net to hold on to the night, to bring us into morning still holding on to  the gifts of it, the invisibility, the freedom from expectations of others, of ourselves.

I’m reminded of the line from the Psalm “Foolish are you who go late to bed and rise early, while God blesses his beloved in their sleep.”  I think that good writing is the verse of belovedness, written while the self sleeps.


 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.