I am visiting my friend I went to Barry college with. We were both English majors and she wanted to be a journalist but became an English teacher. I went on to take Masters in English and became an English teacher. Poetry never leaves my mind and I think that is why I lean toward the gentle and the beautiful. Keats wrote, "Beauty is Truth, and Truth is Beauty." I always stop and smell flowers, gaze at clouds, and I mourne the loss of life and gentleness. Here on retreat, Karla plays classical music, Vivaldi just finished… I woke up with a poem in my mind. Something about Lara, Jupiter "overshadowing her" and written by Keats. This was stimulated by, while on our 4pm walk, we witnessed 2 osprey "doing it" amidst a great clashing of wings and wild cries in a tall pine while we watched from below. We finally left them to their love making, and we walked on. But in my dreams, the poem came. Now to find it!
I woke up at 820am to find Karla having already walked for an hour, at her computer. So I poured a cup of coffee and settled in at my computer to find the poem. She remembered it… but neither of us could identify it. I scoured Keats and found Ode on a Grecian Urn and remembered Truth is Beauty… but couldn’t find "Lara and Jupiter." I kept googling (what a marvelous search engine google is!) and it came up! "Leda and the Swan" by WB Yeats. My brain was close with Lara, Jupiter, and Keats! Leda was a young girl who was violently raped by Zeus who left her after impregnating her, dropping her from his "indifferent beak." Her child, Helen (of Troy), sparked the Trojan War and "Agamemnon dead." We then traveled in memory to another Yeats poem of similar dramatic quality called "The Second Coming." It is also about the violent stimulous of war as "what rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born." I offer these two poems to you to read. They are easily found courtesy of google. Both poems predict our loss of innocence and gentility… Our loss of Christ in many hearts.
As Karla and I talk and come upon one seemingly hopeless situation after another, all we can do, we say, is pray. My sister Sarah said the same, "Susie, what can I do except keep my own balance and try to walk straight." I agree. God bless us as we pray for our own balance.