August 25, 2025 • 16 mins
In this collection of conversations, Ben Palpant, author of Letters From The Mountain, has compiled his intimate, one-on-one interviews with seventeen powerful poets of the 21st century. These conversations cover an entire range of life experience, including grief, hope, culture, the writing craft, family life, and the imagination. Each poet speaks with remarkable candor and joy. Taken together, these interviews are a powerful reminder that poetry remains an essential expression of what it means to be human.
Franz Kafka famously said that "a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." And the words and thoughts contained here aim to wake up much that has become silent in each of us. They contain wisdom that may inspire, instruct, and strengthen, confronting us with the reality that words matter, that poetry matters, and that we matter.
You can purchase a copy of An Axe for the Frozen Sea in the Rabbit Room Store.
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Episode Transcript
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S1 (00:00):
The following is brought to you in partnership with Oasis Audio.
Welcome to Rabbit Room Press Presents, a podcast series of
great audiobooks, one chapter at a time.
S2 (00:16):
An axe for the Frozen Sea by Ben Pallant. Read
for you by the author. Chapter nine Marilyn Nelson Marilyn
Nelson wrote that when she discovered poetry as a child,
it was like soul kissing, the way the words filled
(00:37):
my mouth. In the years since, she has not lost
that intimacy with words, with life itself. It has been
my impression that she holds life in her mouth so
she can taste its many flavors. Even in my initial greeting,
she expressed that wonderful eagerness. I'm so grateful for the
chance to meet you, Marilyn, I say. Thank you for
(00:58):
being willing to spend some time with me. She laughs
and says, well, thank you, but sometimes you don't know
where the conversations will go. Who knows what surprises or
ideas a conversation will bring. I have this little notebook,
just in case. I can't wait to be surprised. Together,
I say, let's start with your faith journey. You were
born in 1946. Your father was a Tuskegee Airman and
(01:21):
served in the United States Air Force. Your mother was
a teacher and pianist. Was church a part of your
growing up? Military life means you move around a lot.
She says, so we didn't have a home church. I
grew up attending the Protestant chapel on base. I remember
having a pre-teen crush on one of my Sunday school teachers.
He was a lieutenant from Montana or Wyoming. In fact,
(01:44):
I recently searched the internet for him and found that
he is known for his Christian service and commitment. I
was glad to hear that. When I was in high school,
my mother joined a Lutheran church in California. It was
a little church that decided to integrate when the neighborhood
became racially diverse, which, as you know, was uncommon for
a church to do in those days. So I became
a Lutheran. Over the years, I became known by those
(02:06):
in leadership as a smart African American who was interested
in poetry. So they invited me to work on a
Lutheran hymnal. My Lutheranism is deep and long lasting. So
your faith has traveled with you through life, I say. Well, mostly,
I suppose. I don't think one's faith journey is a
straight line. It's a meandering, confusing maze. I've been thinking
(02:28):
lately about the phrase accepting the no's. You beg God
for something and he says no. It's hard to accept
the no's. It leaves you with many questions, indeed, and
some are harder to accept than others. Yes, exactly. Some
of them change the entire direction of your life or
your sense of who you are. You've had many life
(02:50):
changing experiences, I say. What were some of those when
you were younger? I spent the summer of 1967 in Chicago,
she says. Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. Moved the civil
rights movement north that year. I supported myself by working
with a little community organization on the West side of Chicago,
and spent whatever time I could get free marching. It
(03:11):
was a summer of marching. It was also a summer
of revelation for me. One of those revelations was the
unmasking of the human heart. We would march by a
little church on a Sunday morning. I remember the doors
opening and people filing out. Little old ladies with gray
hair walking out to the sidewalk where we were mostly praying,
you know. And they would spit at us and yell
(03:32):
sexual profanities. I was shocked. I didn't even know what
these things meant. And I remember Doctor King standing at
the front of the line, reminding us that ours was
the power of love and that we needed to find
that power. You don't soon forget experiences like that, I say.
No you don't, she replies. They still come to mind.
(03:54):
Quite often you'd have been around 20 or 21 years old, right?
That's a formative time of life. Yes, indeed. Over the years,
I say, I've wondered if people kept God's law as
he intended. If we treated each other the way God
told us to treat each other, would racism go away? Maybe,
(04:16):
she says. All I know is that this hostility we
see around the world today has been with us from
the very beginning, brother against brother from Cain and Abel,
all the way to the crucifixion. That's what the Bible
shows us. I grew up with probably 90% white kids
because we were a military family. What I learned from
my time in Chicago is that those kids had to
(04:38):
make conscious decisions to be my friend. One of my
best friends from middle school was a wonderful white girl
named Kim. I used to sleep over at her house,
eat dinner with her family. I remember camping out on
their driveway, she laughs. Kim told me years later that
she had to fight with her parents to be my friend.
I never dreamed of that possibility. She covered it up,
(05:00):
but so did they. Eating dinner with them at least
once a week. I never saw a hint of it.
I'm not sure what to make of all that, but
it was a revelation to me. Was she fighting her
parents because she knew it was right? Or was it
because of something less complex? I think she wasn't doing
anything more than just being a friend to her friend.
To make it larger than that is to assume that
(05:22):
a young child can generalize. I don't think that's what
it was about. You know, in friendship you give your
affection away and it becomes a commitment. How can you
turn your back on that commitment in the long run?
It's these little decisions of love that matter most. In
an interview once, you said that every day is a
portal to the rest of your life. Could you explain?
(05:43):
I'm afraid I have no memory of the context in
which I said that, she says. I laugh. You don't
have all of your interviews memorized? I'm afraid not, but
it certainly sounds good. I suppose every moment is a
portal into the future. There's no way of knowing what
that future holds, but I feel that probably the best
thing to do is find reasons for gratitude in every moment.
(06:04):
There are miracles happening all the time. If you're not
noticing them or grateful for them when they're small, how
will you notice them when they are immense? Gratitude is
part of the price you pay for existence. It's not hard,
but it's terribly important. These little miracles are not hard
to see. I say we're just not practiced at noticing.
(06:27):
A few years ago, I read a prayer called I think,
The Prayer of the Loving Gaze. That's all it is,
putting your love into your eyes as you look around
at the world, at people, at everything to see with
the loving gaze. Gratitude is an entry, a portal into
a rewarding life. That's why people who have nothing can
(06:49):
be as filled with gratitude as those who have abundant stuff.
The gratitude comes from you, not from your circumstances. You're
touching on a topic that has come up quite often
in my conversations with poets. When I started this journey,
I didn't have an agenda. I just wanted to meet
these poets. I suspected, however, that they might help me
grow in gratitude. My favorite poems have gratitude in their eyes.
(07:12):
They have love for the details of life. I wonder
if that's particularly common with poets. That's an interesting question,
she says. If you're any kind of an artist, you
know what it's like to have something not only come
to you, but through you. When you have experienced that
kind of an epiphany, when you write something that taught
you something in the process, then you can only be
(07:33):
humble and grateful to have received such a gift. To
be effective, I say, you have to remain surprised and
amazed by what comes through your pen. I once heard
an interview, she says, with a great classical composer. He
said that he only writes the music that he hears.
She laughs. But how can you hear something that didn't
(07:53):
exist until you wrote it down. It's a marvel, says
Marilyn Nelson. I say, who writes moving poems that come
to her, but she can't explain where they came from.
You only write the music that you hear to. Well,
right now, Marilyn Nelson hopes to hear the music again someday.
She says poems seem to have gone on strike for now.
(08:15):
I'm sorry to hear that, I reply. Have you had
many seasons in your life when the poems dried up?
I have, but this feels different. I think this is
connected to age more than anything. When I was younger
and those dry spells came, I would accept it and
give it an end date. I would say I'm not
going to write for three months or something. It became
(08:36):
a kind of Lenten fast. I've even taken vows of
silence sometimes for that reason. But usually by the time
the specified limits have been reached. I've got it again.
But not this time. To take a farming metaphor, I
say you were letting the soil rest. Yes, exactly. Do
you feel vulnerable and a little anxious by this part
(08:58):
of the aging process? Well, yes. In my family, if
you reach the age of 65, then you're on your
last mental legs. I'm 78, so every time I don't
remember a word everyone says, it's normal, I know. I
feel anxious. My grandmother was fond of saying that aging
is not for the faint of heart. I say. Right.
(09:19):
It's entirely not, she replies. Some writers feel more poetic
when things are going poorly than when things are going well.
Is Joy less inspirational, I ask? I don't know how
to answer that question, she says. My writing tends to
be based on research. It tends to be about lives
that are not my own life, so I can fall
in love with the subject matter. I can write through
(09:41):
the experience as an imaginative act. I'm thinking of my
work on George Washington Carver and other historical characters. Yusef
Komunyakaa says, you are the kind of writer who's rooted
in the basic soil of redemptive imagination. I think he
means that, like with gratitude, you are angling for redemption
(10:01):
in your work. Even if you're writing about difficult things,
you're not just leaving us in that awful moment. I
suppose that's what I'm trying to do when I write.
I have been lucky in having been given subject matter
that is redemptive. Some people have other subject matters to
write about. My own life has been a good life.
I think about what so many people have to deal
with so much suffering in the world. How can I,
(10:23):
sitting here with my three cats and listening to a
bird chirp in a tree, complain about anything? I have
been so blessed. An airplane flies low overhead, so we
have to stop talking when it passes. She laughs and says,
except for when airplanes fly over the top of me
while I'm talking to people. Ah yes, the joys of
living near an airport, I say. But even these airplanes
(10:46):
remind me of my childhood living on the Air Force base.
I used to love hearing those planes when I was
a little girl. Because every plane in the sky could
have been my father flying up there to protect us,
you know? That was my world. Daddy was up there
taking care of us. Goodness. I should write a poem
about that. You had a wonderful relationship with your dad. Yes,
(11:07):
I did. In a world devastated by father hunger, I
say you seem to be one of the lucky few
who had a good one. We need them, she says.
In this society and in this culture, there's a great
deal of pain trying to raise men who will become
good fathers. It's a growing problem, and it's been growing
for a long, long time. Did your dad encourage your
(11:28):
poetic leanings? Yes. He had poetic leanings himself. One of
the treasures I inherited at his death was a little
notebook he used during military briefings. He took notes, but
you would turn the page and find the beginning of
a sonnet. He was working on evidence that the briefing
got really boring. I say, I guess so. You once
(11:48):
said that you prefer to have poems grow inside you.
You said that reading one Rainer Maria Rilke poem can
keep you growing for a month, but reading a lot
of contemporary poetry is like eating M&Ms. Who are the
poets who have made Marilyn Nelson? Who are the poets
you keep going back to over the years? Emily Dickinson,
(12:09):
she says. Rilke. Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, there
are so many. You have a deep affection for kids,
I say. How do you encourage their poetic leanings when
they ask you if they're a poet? What do you
tell them? I try to dissuade them of any fantasies
that they will buy their mother a house with the
money they make from their poetry, she laughs. Then I
(12:31):
tell them to enjoy the ride as an artist. You
don't know where your artistry will lead. If it leads
to some place that is fulfilling, then be happy. But
don't trust it to lead you to fame and fortune,
especially poetry. You have to do it for love, not
to be published or even read or saw. Your writing
will be memorized. love of words and language of creation,
(12:53):
I ask? Yes, but mostly the pursuit of truth. Do
you see your work as inviting readers into a space
where you can pursue truth together, where you can commune together?
Do you see writing poetry as an act of hospitality?
That's a nice image, she says. I can't say that
I've had that picture in my mind while I work,
but I like it. In your poem cover photograph, you
(13:16):
wrote that you wanted to be remembered as an autumn
under maples, a show of incredible leaves. Life is hard
and the road is perilous. So how do we accomplish that?
I think it's by looking with the eyes of wonder.
It's by looking with a loving gaze. I had a friend,
a Catholic priest, who said that when he rode the subway,
when he was in graduate school, he would pick someone
(13:38):
in the subway car to pray for for the duration
of the ride. He had this hope that someday, when
he entered eternity, some of those people would welcome him in.
What a gift to give to a stranger, I say.
It's an anonymous gift, but it's a gift nonetheless. It
takes a great deal of intention to do that. Intention, yes,
but not a lot of effort. You know, you're walking
(14:00):
down the street and your eyes catch the eyes of
a total stranger. And they smile with their eyes and
you smile back. That's a gift. It's the gaze of love.
You don't have to speak. But you've exchanged something that
brightens the human experience. I remember once when I was
a teenager, I was walking across the street. An old
white man was crossing toward me. He had 2 or
(14:21):
3 dogs on leashes. As we met in the middle
of the street, we smiled at each other and he said,
you are beautiful. And just kept walking. What a rare
and wonderful moment, Marilyn. No wonder it stayed with you
all these years. Yes. It was such a generous thing
to say. I have no idea who that man was
(14:42):
or what his life was like, but it was an
exchange so powerful that I have remembered it for over
60 years. You know, the blessing that man bestowed on
me began with our recognizing our union as human beings.
It began with our eyes meeting. So much can change
in this world when we look with the gaze of love.
(15:07):
Here's one of my favorite poems by Marilyn Nelson titled cover. Photograph.
I want to be remembered with big bare arms akimbo
and feet splay toed and flat, arched on the welcome
mat of dirt. I want to be remembered as a
voice that was made to be singing the lullaby of shadows.
(15:28):
As a child fades into a dream. I want to
be as familiar as the woman in the background. When
the heroine is packing and the Yankee soldiers come hair
covered with a bandana. I want to be remembered as
an autumn under maples. A show of incredible leaves. I
want to be remembered with breasts that never look empty.
(15:51):
With a child bearing generous waistline and with generous love
making hips. I want to be remembered with a dark face,
absorbing all colors and giving them back twice as brightly.
Like water. Remembering light. I want to be remembered with
a simple name like mama. As an open door from creation.
(16:14):
As a picture of someone you know.
S1 (16:19):
An axe for the Frozen Sea is published by Rabbit
Room Press. The audio book is published by Oasis Audio.
Copyright by Ben Pallant, 2024. By Chris Badeker.
The following is brought to you in partnership with Oasis Audio.
Welcome to Rabbit Room Press Presents, a podcast series of
great audiobooks, one chapter at a time.
S2 (00:16):
An axe for the Frozen Sea by Ben Pallant. Read
for you by the author. Chapter nine Marilyn Nelson Marilyn
Nelson wrote that when she discovered poetry as a child,
it was like soul kissing, the way the words filled
(00:37):
my mouth. In the years since, she has not lost
that intimacy with words, with life itself. It has been
my impression that she holds life in her mouth so
she can taste its many flavors. Even in my initial greeting,
she expressed that wonderful eagerness. I'm so grateful for the
chance to meet you, Marilyn, I say. Thank you for
(00:58):
being willing to spend some time with me. She laughs
and says, well, thank you, but sometimes you don't know
where the conversations will go. Who knows what surprises or
ideas a conversation will bring. I have this little notebook,
just in case. I can't wait to be surprised. Together,
I say, let's start with your faith journey. You were
born in 1946. Your father was a Tuskegee Airman and
(01:21):
served in the United States Air Force. Your mother was
a teacher and pianist. Was church a part of your
growing up? Military life means you move around a lot.
She says, so we didn't have a home church. I
grew up attending the Protestant chapel on base. I remember
having a pre-teen crush on one of my Sunday school teachers.
He was a lieutenant from Montana or Wyoming. In fact,
(01:44):
I recently searched the internet for him and found that
he is known for his Christian service and commitment. I
was glad to hear that. When I was in high school,
my mother joined a Lutheran church in California. It was
a little church that decided to integrate when the neighborhood
became racially diverse, which, as you know, was uncommon for
a church to do in those days. So I became
a Lutheran. Over the years, I became known by those
(02:06):
in leadership as a smart African American who was interested
in poetry. So they invited me to work on a
Lutheran hymnal. My Lutheranism is deep and long lasting. So
your faith has traveled with you through life, I say. Well, mostly,
I suppose. I don't think one's faith journey is a
straight line. It's a meandering, confusing maze. I've been thinking
(02:28):
lately about the phrase accepting the no's. You beg God
for something and he says no. It's hard to accept
the no's. It leaves you with many questions, indeed, and
some are harder to accept than others. Yes, exactly. Some
of them change the entire direction of your life or
your sense of who you are. You've had many life
(02:50):
changing experiences, I say. What were some of those when
you were younger? I spent the summer of 1967 in Chicago,
she says. Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. Moved the civil
rights movement north that year. I supported myself by working
with a little community organization on the West side of Chicago,
and spent whatever time I could get free marching. It
(03:11):
was a summer of marching. It was also a summer
of revelation for me. One of those revelations was the
unmasking of the human heart. We would march by a
little church on a Sunday morning. I remember the doors
opening and people filing out. Little old ladies with gray
hair walking out to the sidewalk where we were mostly praying,
you know. And they would spit at us and yell
(03:32):
sexual profanities. I was shocked. I didn't even know what
these things meant. And I remember Doctor King standing at
the front of the line, reminding us that ours was
the power of love and that we needed to find
that power. You don't soon forget experiences like that, I say.
No you don't, she replies. They still come to mind.
(03:54):
Quite often you'd have been around 20 or 21 years old, right?
That's a formative time of life. Yes, indeed. Over the years,
I say, I've wondered if people kept God's law as
he intended. If we treated each other the way God
told us to treat each other, would racism go away? Maybe,
(04:16):
she says. All I know is that this hostility we
see around the world today has been with us from
the very beginning, brother against brother from Cain and Abel,
all the way to the crucifixion. That's what the Bible
shows us. I grew up with probably 90% white kids
because we were a military family. What I learned from
my time in Chicago is that those kids had to
(04:38):
make conscious decisions to be my friend. One of my
best friends from middle school was a wonderful white girl
named Kim. I used to sleep over at her house,
eat dinner with her family. I remember camping out on
their driveway, she laughs. Kim told me years later that
she had to fight with her parents to be my friend.
I never dreamed of that possibility. She covered it up,
(05:00):
but so did they. Eating dinner with them at least
once a week. I never saw a hint of it.
I'm not sure what to make of all that, but
it was a revelation to me. Was she fighting her
parents because she knew it was right? Or was it
because of something less complex? I think she wasn't doing
anything more than just being a friend to her friend.
To make it larger than that is to assume that
(05:22):
a young child can generalize. I don't think that's what
it was about. You know, in friendship you give your
affection away and it becomes a commitment. How can you
turn your back on that commitment in the long run?
It's these little decisions of love that matter most. In
an interview once, you said that every day is a
portal to the rest of your life. Could you explain?
(05:43):
I'm afraid I have no memory of the context in
which I said that, she says. I laugh. You don't
have all of your interviews memorized? I'm afraid not, but
it certainly sounds good. I suppose every moment is a
portal into the future. There's no way of knowing what
that future holds, but I feel that probably the best
thing to do is find reasons for gratitude in every moment.
(06:04):
There are miracles happening all the time. If you're not
noticing them or grateful for them when they're small, how
will you notice them when they are immense? Gratitude is
part of the price you pay for existence. It's not hard,
but it's terribly important. These little miracles are not hard
to see. I say we're just not practiced at noticing.
(06:27):
A few years ago, I read a prayer called I think,
The Prayer of the Loving Gaze. That's all it is,
putting your love into your eyes as you look around
at the world, at people, at everything to see with
the loving gaze. Gratitude is an entry, a portal into
a rewarding life. That's why people who have nothing can
(06:49):
be as filled with gratitude as those who have abundant stuff.
The gratitude comes from you, not from your circumstances. You're
touching on a topic that has come up quite often
in my conversations with poets. When I started this journey,
I didn't have an agenda. I just wanted to meet
these poets. I suspected, however, that they might help me
grow in gratitude. My favorite poems have gratitude in their eyes.
(07:12):
They have love for the details of life. I wonder
if that's particularly common with poets. That's an interesting question,
she says. If you're any kind of an artist, you
know what it's like to have something not only come
to you, but through you. When you have experienced that
kind of an epiphany, when you write something that taught
you something in the process, then you can only be
(07:33):
humble and grateful to have received such a gift. To
be effective, I say, you have to remain surprised and
amazed by what comes through your pen. I once heard
an interview, she says, with a great classical composer. He
said that he only writes the music that he hears.
She laughs. But how can you hear something that didn't
(07:53):
exist until you wrote it down. It's a marvel, says
Marilyn Nelson. I say, who writes moving poems that come
to her, but she can't explain where they came from.
You only write the music that you hear to. Well,
right now, Marilyn Nelson hopes to hear the music again someday.
She says poems seem to have gone on strike for now.
(08:15):
I'm sorry to hear that, I reply. Have you had
many seasons in your life when the poems dried up?
I have, but this feels different. I think this is
connected to age more than anything. When I was younger
and those dry spells came, I would accept it and
give it an end date. I would say I'm not
going to write for three months or something. It became
(08:36):
a kind of Lenten fast. I've even taken vows of
silence sometimes for that reason. But usually by the time
the specified limits have been reached. I've got it again.
But not this time. To take a farming metaphor, I
say you were letting the soil rest. Yes, exactly. Do
you feel vulnerable and a little anxious by this part
(08:58):
of the aging process? Well, yes. In my family, if
you reach the age of 65, then you're on your
last mental legs. I'm 78, so every time I don't
remember a word everyone says, it's normal, I know. I
feel anxious. My grandmother was fond of saying that aging
is not for the faint of heart. I say. Right.
(09:19):
It's entirely not, she replies. Some writers feel more poetic
when things are going poorly than when things are going well.
Is Joy less inspirational, I ask? I don't know how
to answer that question, she says. My writing tends to
be based on research. It tends to be about lives
that are not my own life, so I can fall
in love with the subject matter. I can write through
(09:41):
the experience as an imaginative act. I'm thinking of my
work on George Washington Carver and other historical characters. Yusef
Komunyakaa says, you are the kind of writer who's rooted
in the basic soil of redemptive imagination. I think he
means that, like with gratitude, you are angling for redemption
(10:01):
in your work. Even if you're writing about difficult things,
you're not just leaving us in that awful moment. I
suppose that's what I'm trying to do when I write.
I have been lucky in having been given subject matter
that is redemptive. Some people have other subject matters to
write about. My own life has been a good life.
I think about what so many people have to deal
with so much suffering in the world. How can I,
(10:23):
sitting here with my three cats and listening to a
bird chirp in a tree, complain about anything? I have
been so blessed. An airplane flies low overhead, so we
have to stop talking when it passes. She laughs and says,
except for when airplanes fly over the top of me
while I'm talking to people. Ah yes, the joys of
living near an airport, I say. But even these airplanes
(10:46):
remind me of my childhood living on the Air Force base.
I used to love hearing those planes when I was
a little girl. Because every plane in the sky could
have been my father flying up there to protect us,
you know? That was my world. Daddy was up there
taking care of us. Goodness. I should write a poem
about that. You had a wonderful relationship with your dad. Yes,
(11:07):
I did. In a world devastated by father hunger, I
say you seem to be one of the lucky few
who had a good one. We need them, she says.
In this society and in this culture, there's a great
deal of pain trying to raise men who will become
good fathers. It's a growing problem, and it's been growing
for a long, long time. Did your dad encourage your
(11:28):
poetic leanings? Yes. He had poetic leanings himself. One of
the treasures I inherited at his death was a little
notebook he used during military briefings. He took notes, but
you would turn the page and find the beginning of
a sonnet. He was working on evidence that the briefing
got really boring. I say, I guess so. You once
(11:48):
said that you prefer to have poems grow inside you.
You said that reading one Rainer Maria Rilke poem can
keep you growing for a month, but reading a lot
of contemporary poetry is like eating M&Ms. Who are the
poets who have made Marilyn Nelson? Who are the poets
you keep going back to over the years? Emily Dickinson,
(12:09):
she says. Rilke. Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, there
are so many. You have a deep affection for kids,
I say. How do you encourage their poetic leanings when
they ask you if they're a poet? What do you
tell them? I try to dissuade them of any fantasies
that they will buy their mother a house with the
money they make from their poetry, she laughs. Then I
(12:31):
tell them to enjoy the ride as an artist. You
don't know where your artistry will lead. If it leads
to some place that is fulfilling, then be happy. But
don't trust it to lead you to fame and fortune,
especially poetry. You have to do it for love, not
to be published or even read or saw. Your writing
will be memorized. love of words and language of creation,
(12:53):
I ask? Yes, but mostly the pursuit of truth. Do
you see your work as inviting readers into a space
where you can pursue truth together, where you can commune together?
Do you see writing poetry as an act of hospitality?
That's a nice image, she says. I can't say that
I've had that picture in my mind while I work,
but I like it. In your poem cover photograph, you
(13:16):
wrote that you wanted to be remembered as an autumn
under maples, a show of incredible leaves. Life is hard
and the road is perilous. So how do we accomplish that?
I think it's by looking with the eyes of wonder.
It's by looking with a loving gaze. I had a friend,
a Catholic priest, who said that when he rode the subway,
when he was in graduate school, he would pick someone
(13:38):
in the subway car to pray for for the duration
of the ride. He had this hope that someday, when
he entered eternity, some of those people would welcome him in.
What a gift to give to a stranger, I say.
It's an anonymous gift, but it's a gift nonetheless. It
takes a great deal of intention to do that. Intention, yes,
but not a lot of effort. You know, you're walking
(14:00):
down the street and your eyes catch the eyes of
a total stranger. And they smile with their eyes and
you smile back. That's a gift. It's the gaze of love.
You don't have to speak. But you've exchanged something that
brightens the human experience. I remember once when I was
a teenager, I was walking across the street. An old
white man was crossing toward me. He had 2 or
(14:21):
3 dogs on leashes. As we met in the middle
of the street, we smiled at each other and he said,
you are beautiful. And just kept walking. What a rare
and wonderful moment, Marilyn. No wonder it stayed with you
all these years. Yes. It was such a generous thing
to say. I have no idea who that man was
(14:42):
or what his life was like, but it was an
exchange so powerful that I have remembered it for over
60 years. You know, the blessing that man bestowed on
me began with our recognizing our union as human beings.
It began with our eyes meeting. So much can change
in this world when we look with the gaze of love.
(15:07):
Here's one of my favorite poems by Marilyn Nelson titled cover. Photograph.
I want to be remembered with big bare arms akimbo
and feet splay toed and flat, arched on the welcome
mat of dirt. I want to be remembered as a
voice that was made to be singing the lullaby of shadows.
(15:28):
As a child fades into a dream. I want to
be as familiar as the woman in the background. When
the heroine is packing and the Yankee soldiers come hair
covered with a bandana. I want to be remembered as
an autumn under maples. A show of incredible leaves. I
want to be remembered with breasts that never look empty.
(15:51):
With a child bearing generous waistline and with generous love
making hips. I want to be remembered with a dark face,
absorbing all colors and giving them back twice as brightly.
Like water. Remembering light. I want to be remembered with
a simple name like mama. As an open door from creation.
(16:14):
As a picture of someone you know.
S1 (16:19):
An axe for the Frozen Sea is published by Rabbit
Room Press. The audio book is published by Oasis Audio.
Copyright by Ben Pallant, 2024. By Chris Badeker.
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