12/20/24

 Friday, December 20, 2024

D+45

1935 Pope Pius XI published the encyclical Ad Catholici Sacerdotii on the importance of priestly celibacy

1983 PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and 4,000 loyalists evacuated Lebanon

In bed around 9:30, awake around 3:00, up at 2:20 unable to sleep.  Awale most of the early hours but nodded off at some point and woke up on the recliner at 9:30.  About 6 inches of snow yesterday and last night.

Prednisone, day 220, 7.5 mg., day 35.    Prednisone at 4:50.  Other mds at 9:40.     Trulicity injection at 10:50.

The Widow’s Lament in Springtime by William Carlos Williams

Sorrow is my own yard / where the new grass / flames as it has flamed / often before, but not / with the cold fire / that closes round me this year.

Thirty-five years / I lived with my husband.

The plum tree is white today / with masses of flowers. /Masses of flowers / load the cherry branches / and color some bushes / yellow and some red,

but the grief in my heart / is stronger than they,

for though they were my joy / formerly, today I notice them / and turn away forgetting.

Today my son told me / that in the meadows, / at the edge of the heavy woods / in the distance, he saw / trees of white flowers.

I feel that I would like / to go there /and fall into those flowers /and sink into the marsh near them.

 .  . . . . 

Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: άποθανεῖν θέλω.

. . . . .

Come Up from the Fields Father by Walt Whitman

Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,

And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.

Lo, ’tis autumn,

Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,

Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind,

Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines,   

(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?

Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)

Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds,   

Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well.

Down in the fields all prospers well,

But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter’s call,

And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.

Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling,

She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust her cap.

Open the envelope quickly,   

O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d,

O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul!

All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only,

Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,

At present low, but will soon be better.

Ah now the single figure to me,

Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms,

Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint,

By the jamb of a door leans.

Grieve not so, dear mother, (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs,

The little sisters huddle around speechless and dismay’d,)

See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better.

Alas poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be better, that brave and simple soul,)

While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,

The only son is dead.

But the mother needs to be better,

She with thin form presently drest in black,

By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,

In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,   

O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,

To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.