At the Summer Solstice

I first came across the African American spiritual years before I traced the source back to its Biblical roots: “Ezekiel saw the wheel,/ Way up in the middle of the air.”  The simple but rousing song offered a cosmological vision and was, to my young mind, quite reassuring: there was order in the universe, discernable pattern, and forces far greater than my own to guide its course.  “And the little wheel run by Faith;/ And the big wheel run by the Grace of God;/ A wheel in a wheel,/ Way up in the middle of the air.”  What does it take to upset our vision of an orderly world?  To return us to our childlike fears that chaos, perhaps, lurks at every turn, and the whole beautiful mechanism may come crashing down around us?

I think it may be necessary for us to acknowledge that we’ve all been shaken to the core: by the pandemic itself; by the loss of loved ones, or even just the threat of loss; by the sense that our nation’s traditional structures and foundational beliefs – once thought virtually indestructible – could, without warning, crumble before our eyes.  Or worse, might never have existed in the first place – at least in the forms we imagined.  But we are not the little children in the back seat of the car, trusting our godlike parents to steer; we are those very adults whose hands control the wheel – and there are children depending on us to navigate safely.  Making her second Red Letter appearance, Joyce Peseroff offers a beguiling poem that seems to occupy a space somewhere between innocence and experience, or perhaps both at once.  The speaker is literally positioned in the front seat of a car – but for her, this last year-and-a-half has made the world feel strangely mutable.  She entertains the naïve belief that, looking away for a moment, a whole season might have slipped by without warning.  And when she offers a litany of all the markers, ceremonies, rites of passage erased by the crisis, I could feel the little boy in me suffering his quiet outrage. . .until the poet conjures the voices of actual children in the back seat – and then I felt my grip tighten on the wheel once again.

And so the small wheel of the poem touches upon the great wheel of the year, turning still, offering us the day of longest sunshine, preparing us for the slow diminuendo ahead.  I feel my life located within Joyce’s poem and, for the moment, at peace. “At the Summer Solstice” is making its first appearance in these Red Letters – but if you’d like more of her work, I can recommend Joyce’s newest collection Petition (Carnegie Mellon University Press) for its deeply humanistic vision and bracing voice.