Poem of the Week, by Keetje Kuipers
Long ago I left behind the simple prayers of my childhood, the ones spoken in unison with others in church, or around the table at a special meal when everyone named something they were thankful for. I’ve never known what God is, and I don’t know what God is to others. If forced to come up with a definition, my definition of God would be something like the feeling of my children on either side of me in bed as I read them to sleep when they were little. God would be the high school students I used to teach, ringed on the floor in our classroom on the giant pillows I’d made, still and silent and sometimes falling asleep on Friday afternoons as I read them stories. God would be the idea and the feeling of peace, of a place where nothing bad can happen, where only love and comfort dwell. God would be the poems that swell my heart open in a way that almost hurts, like this one below.
Prayer, by Keetje Kuipers
Perhaps as a child you had the chicken pox
and your mother, to soothe you in your fever
or to help you fall asleep, came into your room
and read to you from some favorite book,
Charlotte’s Web or Little House on the Prairie,
a long story that she quietly took you through
until your eyes became magnets for your shuttering
lids and she saw your breathing go slow. And then
she read on, this time silently and to herself,
not because she didn’t know the story,
it seemed to her that there had never been a time
when she didn’t know this story—the young girl
and her benevolence, the young girl in her sod house—
but because she did not yet want to leave your side
though she knew there was nothing more
she could do for you. And you, not asleep but simply weak,
listened to her turn the pages, still feeling
the lamp warm against one cheek, knowing the shape
of the rocking chair’s shadow as it slid across
your chest. So that now, these many years later,
when you are clenched in the damp fist of a hospital bed,
or signing the papers that say you won’t love him anymore,
when you are bent at your son’s gravesite or haunted
by a war that makes you wake with the gun
cocked in your hand, you would like to believe
that such generosity comes from God, too,
who now, when you have the strength to ask, might begin
the story again, just as your mother would,
from the place where you have both left off.
Me to a roomful of high school students last week: “Raise a hand if you’ve lost someone you love to murder.”
When my children were little one of our favorite books was The Philharmonic Gets Dressed. Such a simple story. In apartments all over New York City, orchestra musicians are dressing for the evening performance. Everyone wears black. They muscle their instruments, large and small, into cabs and the subway, and they head to work. My children and I read this book over and over, usually at bedtime, where it soothed their way into sleep. It’s long gone from my shelves, but I still think about it. 
The men I love most get it, with “it” being the malevolence of treating women as if we’re not equal. At one point the other night, when I could suddenly barely talk because of the rage that filled me, a male friend said about sexism, It’s like air, invisible and everywhere. And you breathe it in your whole life, but when the switch flips and you suddenly realize how deep it goes and how awful it is, it’s fucking overwhelming. 
Every summer in my teens I canoed with friends through the Rideau region of lakes and canals in Ontario. We camped every night, swam, cooked, laughed, told ghost stories and played games. One annual camping spot was on a lake with an enormous rope swing tied to an overhanging tree. You grabbed the rope, stepped back as far as you could, swung out over the water and then plummeted. The rope swing took nerve. The drop was steep and the water cold, and once you committed, you had to leap – if you swung back you’d crash against the tree and the rocky bluff. Leaping from it was wild and exhilarating. Once, as I swung out, I looked down to see a long water snake swirling in the water directly below me. My fear of snakes is lifelong and deep-seated, and I was horrified, but there was no going back. I plummeted with my eyes closed and struck out for shore the second I surfaced.
A few years ago my brother sent me a photo of my nephew, with the caption Getting his mind blown at Nickelodeon Universe. Nickelodeon Universe is a crowded and noisy place, but in the photo, my tiny nephew stands alone in a huge open space, his head craned up, staring at something I can’t see. The photo conveys profound stillness and concentration. Sometimes it pops up on my screensaver and I wonder again what my nephew was staring at, what was going through his mind. 
Once, a long time ago, someone close to me handed me a memo and asked me to read it. It was a work memo that summarized some unfair working conditions. I didn’t know who had written it, but my first comment was “Wow. Whoever wrote this can’t spell worth a damn and doesn’t know how to use punctuation, either.” The person who had handed me the memo didn’t hear me say this, for which I was instantly grateful, because it turned out that they had written it. This was a person I loved with all my heart. The shame I felt in that moment is something that will be with me forever. 
My youngest didn’t walk until she was 22 months old. Instinct told me she was fine so I didn’t worry about this, but I observed her with interest. One day, when I was in the kitchen and she was sitting in a patch of sun on the living room floor, her back to me, I watched in wonder as she rose –no hands, no support, no nothing– to a full stand and began to walk. I had never seen a child go from crawling to perfect walking in an instant like that. She never went back to crawling.
Neither my friend nor I had been to a high school reunion in many years –in my case, decades–and we were both nervous. The years we had spent growing up together in upstate New York seemed far away, and we hadn’t kept in touch with many classmates. So we met early, at the bar in that tiny stoplight-less town, and fortified ourselves with gin while paging through our yearbook to remind ourselves of faces and names. At one point I said to him, It’s been decades. We don’t look the same, will anyone else? 
Long ago, when I taught Mandarin at a big city high school in Minneapolis, some of my students would stay after school and talk with me. One was a Hmong young man, quiet and shy, with halting English. He would sit in the chair by my desk and cast his glance at the floor. For a long time I would inwardly urge him to look at me —look at me look at me come on look me in the eye– and then it came to me that his avoiding my direct gaze was part of his culture, and a sign of respect. All my annoyance melted away and from then on I was more soft-spoken, gentle, and slow in his presence. 
Alison McGhee 