The Poem That Started It All: Poem A Day October

I’ve had the great good fortune of finding a poem that succinctly captures two of the most important moments in my life: the day I met my husband, and the moment our first child was born. I call these threshold moments. When something completely new is beginning. Sometimes we know, or at least think we know, what these moments will look like. Thankfully, we are usually wrong and some combination of God’s grace and our choices lead us places we never thought we’d go, or even want to.

Mostly, when I look back over the trajectory of my life, I’m surprised at how I got here. To this moment, with this man, and these tiny humans who call me mama. I look around at all of this joy, this chaos, this very life swirling around me and wonder how the woman who started this life with sorrow upon sorrow could have a heart so filled with love.

And I recall that cold February Chicago morning when I met him, standing on the steps of the Cathedral. It all started there. With a hello, and a rosary, and steaming mugs of coffee sipped slowly.

The beginning of this poem by Louis MacNeice encapsulates that day so perfectly. And I keep thinking it’s a poem about that moment when we met. When we looked at each other and felt that feeling…“At last, this one is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh”. The beginning that has no end.

But the end of this poem, oh the end. It is all my Margaret Gianna and the moment I heard her first cry, and saw her perfect body. “And life no longer what it was…”

Meeting Point

Louis MacNeice

Time was away and somewhere else,

There were two glasses and two chairs

And two people with the one pulse

(Somebody stopped the moving stairs)

Time was away and somewhere else.

And they were neither up nor down;

The stream’s music did not stop

Flowing through heather, limpid brown,

Although they sat in a coffee shop

And they were neither up nor down.

The bell was silent in the air

Holding its inverted poise –

Between the clang and clang a flower,

A brazen calyx of no noise:

The bell was silent in the air.

The camels crossed the miles of sand

That stretched around the cups and plates;

The desert was their own, they planned

To portion out the stars and dates:

The camels crossed the miles of sand.

Time was away and somewhere else.

The waiter did not come, the clock

Forgot them and the radio waltz

Came out like water from a rock:

Time was away and somewhere else.

Her fingers flicked away the ash

That bloomed again in tropic trees:

Not caring if the markets crash

When they had forests such as these,

Her fingers flicked away the ash.

God or whatever means the Good

Be praised that time can stop like this,

That what the heart has understood

Can verify in the body’s peace

God or whatever means the Good.

Time was away and she was here

And life no longer what it was,

The bell was silent in the air

And all the room one glow because

Time was away and she was here.