Loss (Days 9-12)

Come home.

This is the third set of eleven posts I’m doing every four days during Lent as a sort of online devotional. These posts include poems, passages, songs, film clips, stories, and more for you to spend time with each day. They’re meant to help you think about being creative, observant, empathetic, and/or still. I will offer all of them with very little or no context.

Days 5-8

Day 9 (March 3)

LET EVENING COME

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.

—JANE KENYON

Hear Jane Kenyon read the poem here.

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Day 10 (March 4)

The most beautiful opening to a movie, ever.

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Day 11 (March 5)

From FAIR AND TENDER LADIES

For Daddy had loved the spring. He used to plow and hold the plowed earth to his face, he loved how it smelled, I recall him doing that when I was not but a little thing and him saying to Babe, Isn’t this good now? and Don’t this smell just like spring? and Babe rolling his eyes and snorting like Daddy had lost his mind. Farming is pretty work, Daddy said.

…Daddy loved the dogwood and the sarvis and how they looked blooming all by therselves up here on Blue Star Mountain afore everything else got green. He used to take us way up on the mountain in the wee early spring to tap a birch and get the sap, he cut off a big piece of bark for us to lick the inside, it tasted so sweet, I recall he said to me one time Now Ivy, this is how spring tastes. This is the taste of spring.

LEE SMITH, 1988

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Day 12 (March 6)