"Confined to a wheelchair since childhood, Hall viewed life from the window of an upper room in her family's house in Portland, Oregon. To better observe passersby on the sidewalk, she positioned a small mirror on her windowsill. Hall was an accomplished seamstress: her fine needlework helped to support the family and provided a vivid body of imagery for her precisely crafted, often gorgeously embellished poems.
Hall's writings—her mirror trained on the world—convey the dark undertones of the lives of working women in the early twentieth century, while bringing into focus her own private, reclusive life—her limited mobility, her isolation and loneliness, her gifts with needlework and words, and her exquisite grief." -http://osupress.oregonstate.edu/book/collected-poems-of-hazel-hall
"Weeper in the Dark"
Be thankful, weeper in the dark, for tears.
Cherish each oval spark
Of moisture that upon your lash appears
To be a small defiance to the dark.
Make cups of both your hands, feel cool tears fall
Upon your palm's hot skin,
And know you hold the essences of all
The worth of you through piety or sin.
Be thankful that the full breath still may run
Distilling itself in tears for you to weep.
Better to grieve than smile into the sun
Like one who smiles in sleep.
--Cry of Time. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1928
Helen Keller b. 1880 - d. 1968With alert fingers I listen
To the showers of sound
That the wind shakes from the forest.
I bathe in the liquid shade
Under the pines, where the air hangs cool
After the shower is done.
-from "A Chant of Darkness" 1908
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7857887-the-world-i-live-in-and-optimism
Helen Joy Davidman (Mrs. C.S. Lewis) 1915-1960
Sentimentalist
Nothing has gone as I would have it go, and it is late, the sun is nearly down. The wind is rising in the twilight pines, and I am very tired. I do not love tonight, the pale pink east or the first star, or the young virgin moon or any man. Not even myself. Nothing, tonight, but sleep. And yet, let me be grateful for the shell I found beside the path and carried back though it broke in my pocket. Let me give thanks to God for the small things that bring healing at these times when love and hate alike grow stale. Give thanks for the one ant that clambers up the grassblade and the one oakleaf that is turning red; snailshells, spiderwebs, and acorn cups. O God, whose greatest gifts I have so much misused, whose love I turned into lust, whose laughter I have made poisonous with irony, whose tears I have wasted on my self-made griefs, blessed art thou for all these small perfections; stay me with grassblades, comfort me with crickets, blue jays, butterflies, and acorn cups.
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| © S. Patterson 2016 |
Davidman, Joy. A Naked Tree (p. 280)
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