In Dramatic Universe, Volume 3, Bennett speaks about the stages of life. Of particular interest is what he has to say about the final stage of life. He puts the notion of “retirement” on its head, recommending that during this stage, one “retires” to a less outwardly active life. Dedicating part of each day to slower, quieter, inner activities. This is the time to be active inwardly rather than externally; a time when one’s attention is not focused on making money, advancing a career; doing things.
Last week I mentioned David Kherdian, a poet and 4th Way practitioner entering his nineties. David and Nonny have recently moved (yet again). This time it’s to an assisted living facility in Massachusetts. The difference is that this time, David expressed to me that he has come to accept “I cannot do things anymore.”
Several years ago David and Nonny moved to an assisted living place in the mid-west. There they came to the conclusion that they “weren’t ready to die.” So, they picked up and drove to Asheville, NC, a town David said, “I had always wanted to visit.” Which is where our paths crossed after many years of infrequent contact.
I mention all this because I am struck by David’s openness in sharing what goes through him and in the fact that my own “last phase of life” lags not so far behind his. Notwithstanding the multiple moves David and Nonny have made in just the past three years, David’s poetry continues to pour out and the quality continues to improve with age, like fine wine.
David handed the following two poems to me during our recent visit. I find them heart-wrenching and amazing the more I re-read them:
LOST DAUGHTER
for Kelly
To raise yourself up
but not a daughter
is to be childless—
an odd man out.
Not many attain it,
and it is not an achievement,
and may or may not be a loss,
for you can’t miss what you never had,
like a memory of something that can’t be remembered,
because you can’t exchange nothing
for an experience you missed—
It is lonely now in old age
to face the reaper empty handed
without the daughter you cannot
miss, or only miss like
the fly ball that fell between
your hands, a clean miss
But this doesn’t feel clean or
even dirty, because experiences
are the most important thing in life,
and only from them can we grow—
like the child you never had,
who fell between your
gripped fingers,
with you unable to hold what wasn’t there.
HOLDING
There in the photo kept in our album,
I am sitting on the ground beside our
neighbor, Deanna, slightly older,
clutching tenderly a tame black and
white rabbit in sheer and utter bliss,
to make a picture freezing in a moment
of time, as good poems can often do
Showing me that life is not a fleeting
action, but a thing stored in separate frames,
that we somehow have trouble deciphering,
for we are more comfortable with speed
than we are with rest
And too often to decipher what these
evanescent moments hold—
but then there is this photo that captures
again my full attention and wonder
each time I see it, in intervals some-
times of years, to see and feel again
the depths of my love for tender things,
which my essence holds unsmothered
by the years.
6/2021