Sunday poems - "Infirmity"

Sandi, a longtime friend of my family and an incredible woman of faith, passed away from cancer last week. Yesterday my mom went to her funeral, and spent part of the day with Sandi's husband and three school-aged kids.

Her death has made me reflective about many things. As her husband Brian wrote in an email sent to all of her friends and family - "cancer was the little 'c' in Sandi's life; Christ was the big 'C'." She had cancer for eight years, and was hopeful, loving, and active throughout those years, despite her diagnosis.

I miss her. My family will miss her. Many people around the country and the world will miss her. The first time I got an email signed just "Brian," and not "Brian and Sandi," it hit me that she is really gone.

I won't belabor things here - for those of you who didn't know her, this is abstract. For those of you who did, there are better and more beautiful tributes on her CaringBridge website. But I did want to post a Sunday poem here, in her memory, and in the spirit of faith in Jesus in which she lived her life.

"Infirmity" - Theodore Roethke

In purest song one plays the constant fool As changes shimmer in the inner eye. I stare and stare into a deepening pool And tell myself my image cannot die. I love myself: that’s my one constancy. Oh, to be something else, yet still to be! Sweet Christ, rejoice in my infirmity; There’s little left I care to call my own. Today they drained the fluid from a knee And pumped a shoulder full of cortisone; Thus I conform to my divinity By dying inward, like an aging tree. The instant ages on the living eye; Light on its rounds, a pure extreme of light Breaks on me as my meager flesh breaks down— The soul delights in that extremity. Blessed the meek; they shall inherit wrath; I’m son and father of my only death. A mind too active is no mind at all; The deep eye sees the shimmer on the stone; The eternal seeks, and finds, the temporal, The change from dark to light of the slow moon, Dead to myself, and all I hold most dear, I move beyond the reach of wind and fire. Deep in the greens of summer sing the lives I’ve come to love. A vireo whets its bill. The great day balances upon the leaves; My ears still hear the bird when all is still; My soul is still my soul, and still the Son, And knowing this, I am not yet undone. Things without hands take hands: there is no choice,— Eternity’s not easily come by. When opposites come suddenly in place, I teach my eyes to hear, my ears to see How body from spirit slowly does unwind Until we are pure spirit at the end.