I fell in love with this poet my first year of seminary. I took a class with Dr. Donald Capps called "Poetry and the Care of Souls," about the place of poetry in pastoral care. It was incredible, and there I fell in love with several poets who were new to me - Billy Collins, Donald Hall, and Louise Gluck, to name just a few. A poet who Daryl and I both immediately fell in love with in that class was Jane Kenyon. In fact, we named our second kitty after her (though the kitty's a boy) because we've started a habit of naming our cats after poets. Cats are quite poetical animals, if you think about it.
Jane Kenyon's poetry is simple and beautiful, full of images of nature and ordinary life. She struggled with depression throughout her life, so I'm reconnecting with her poetry as I write my final paper for my second class with Dr. Capps - "Ministry and Mental Illness." It seems right, somehow, to begin and end my time in seminary with such a wonderful professor and with such a wonderful poet.
This is the poem I'm citing in the final paper I'm writing on pastoral care and Alzheimer's disease. It comes back to me when I'm at the end of something - an internship, a summer, a graduate school program. In times of transition, even if that transition is hard sad, God does not leave us.
"Let Evening Come"
by Jane Kenyon
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
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