Orphan Lamb

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A black lamb centered in a green field,

his thin breathed-into sides confirming

his bereft call for milk amongst the bedraggled

white fleeced mothers, looking on,

who stood and watched, not hearing

‘plaintive’ or ‘lost’ or ‘waiting to be fed’

but the cry of another mother’s son

needing to find his own way back

to the flow-source of milk and the warm

fleece hug of his mother’s belly

swaying above the teat. They would stand

above his black skeletal form beneath the trees

dropping their heads to drive him off

and stamp and turn again, nudging their own

half hesitant, half happy lambs away.

We walked the fields an hour looking

for a mother standing alone or with a single lamb,

the burnt sun falling to a misted light,

the trees become silhouettes, black as the lamb itself,

our eyes and ears in the crowded field

bent to the ancient prayer rising around us,

the evensong of grief and motherhood,

call and response, wanting and not wanting,

the church bell call of a passing rook

sounding the hour as the last pale

just burnt gold of a cloud framed

our shadows, walking the lit vale

toward the car, toward loss, toward

something in our low disappointed voices

trying to remember from childhood both

the sense of source and the act of being pushed away,

where we were wanted and where we were not.

In the end, we took him home, to a waiting mother

who had lost her own, penned in a barn,

her grown head turned away in the wooden crush

so the lamb could drink and hours later

in the sweet hay strewn dark of the enclosing barn

the mother ewe could smell her own milk

tasted through the lamb’s own breath

their mutual life come to life by self-recognition,

the black lamb pulling mightily at the dugs

as the mother looked on, as we looked on,

and looked at one another

passing the tiny airline bottle,

the faint breath of whisky from our nip

misting and pluming in the half-lit barn.

The single, full malt taste of something met,

a breathing through in the chest, a way of coming to

and of tasting again, the essence of wanting to live,

something paid for by our seeking and our patience,

just a tang, a hint, a mere breath in the glow light,

of being born again.

David Whyte

in, The Bell and the Blackbird

Despite All

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“The quarrels of popes and kings, 

with wars and pestilences in every page; 

the men all so good for nothing and 

hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome.” 

—Jane Austen

Sometimes the choices we make around relationships and work seem to have no choice in them at all. Each of us grapples with forces far larger than our goals or ourselves: each of us wrestles with our family inheritance, our educational possibilities, the lucky or unlucky DNA that ordains our health and, especially, the fateful time in history into which we were born.

There are other powers we like to forget. 

Nature can be a deadly arbiter of our future, independent of our human need to plan. Nature’s winds can drive us out of a city, destroy our schools and undermine a health system for years to come. A tsunami can devastate a thousand miles of coastline, and constant rain may inundate half a nation. 

As human beings, we have a necessary conceit about our own ability to influence events. 

The truth about our own modest contribution might immobilize us: much easier then, to tell ourselves a story about how much we make our own reality. 

The United States, that supposed bedrock home of upward mobility, is actually one of the developed industrial nations where people are most likely to live and die in the class to which they were born. We are creatures who like to believe our own publicity, and we do not like to face powers that can easily surpass and encompass our best hopes. We hope always for a free pass to circumvent forces that humble us on a daily basis.

Although we can never escape these overarching powers and difficulties, it can be instructive to look to those who have made sense of their life or their work in the midst of overwhelming circumstances, circumstances where we would have every reason either not to try or to look the other way and pretend they did not exist.

Shakespeare’s sonnet 64 is unstintingly courageous in this regard: it demonstrates the kind of courage needed to look the leveled World Trade Center towers in the eye, to survey a devastated New Orleans or to say goodbye for the last time in the face of a loved one’s death.

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced

The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;

When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed

And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

When I have seen the hungry ocean gain

Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,

And the firm soil win of the watery main,

Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;

When I have seen such interchange of state,

Or state it self confounded to decay,

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate

That Time will come and take my love away.

This thought is as a death which cannot choose

But weep to have, that which it fears to lose.

Shakespeare

David Whyte