By Barry Casey
I’ve been reading Jane Kenyon’s Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, for several months now. Among the many poets I read regularly, her voice is one of those closest to my heart. Tentative but tender, vivid in imagery and metaphor, she can be starkly realistic about her pain, her bouts with depression, and her quiet joys.
She died of leukemia in 1995, after just over a year of treatments and exquisite suffering. Her husband, the poet Donald Hall, completed Otherwise after her death. This poem has become for me a kind of prayer.
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.
I like the repetition of the phrase, ‘Let it come,’ the finely-drawn imagery of common objects, and the dawning realization that we are urged to let the rhythms of the natural world speak to us. In the evocation of the evening, we sense her impending death and her acceptance of it. And then the promise that God is, and will be, with us.
Another insight this poem brings to me: We make our worlds and join them to the worlds of others. We spend our days hurrying, adding, spending. But we also need a Sabbath rest, a day in which we don’t have to make, but we ourselves can be remade.
For more from Barry Casey check out the upcoming retreat Poetry, Faith, and Mystery on Friday, October 10 from 9:30am to 4:00pm.