The Season of Our Sundering
Under locust trees, in the blossoming park by Town Hall,
masked and unmasked walkers dip hands in the fountain pool,
cool on this hot day, a limbic throwback to summers
at Walden or Long Pond, a day’s release from work.
Near a young pear tree, I sit on a stone bench in noon sun,
watch my country divide. She that was great among the nations,
Jeremiah grieved, and princess among the provinces, how is she
become tributary! She weepeth sore in the night. Our resident ER doc
posts to the town Facebook list: help us save lives, help us
flatten…Jeremiah was thrown into a cistern of mud, despised,
imprisoned. And whatever prayer is, I pray for the mocked
and the deniers. My breathlessness is easing. I can walk up stairs,
stroll here like the others. I have no God to talk to, though I try.
“How deserted lies the city,/ once so full of people!/ How like a widow is she,/ who once was great among the nations!” Teresa Cader’s poem, too, is a lamentation, a word that calls up its Biblical roots. But it doesn’t take a poet to understand that great loss is indeed possible, that the temple of our peaceful days can quickly be turned into rubble. We all remember when the pandemic struck; overnight, our towns became desolate and fear, too, was contagion. And now, as the year draws to a close, such dark forces have been unleashed in our nation that many despair for democracy’s very survival. Perhaps that’s where a poet’s skill is required: in refocusing what we know to reveal the deepest resonance, to expose the dizzying implications. I think Teresa’s poem possesses a devastating beauty because it takes what is close at hand and suddenly, with a dramatic shift in reference, gives us a god’s-eye view of our moment together on this planet. Without resorting to polemics, she quietly reminds us that our decisions matter, shape our fate: what we owe to each other – to our community, commonwealth, country – in small and great moments of choice, will write the next verse of our lives. If her poem is a quiet Jeremiad, it speaks, not as a prophet, but another compassionate citizen shopping in the same marketplace as we do, struggling with the same challenges, resting nearby (but at a ‘social distance’) in our neighborhood park. Perhaps that’s poetry’s most enigmatic quality: in operating within the most personal and specific it achieves a universality where every reader can recognize their reflection.
I introduced Teresa’s work in Red Letter #4, mentioning her three poetry collections — History of Hurricanes, The Paper Wasp, and Guests – and her numerous awards, including The Norma Farber First Book Award, The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, and more. I can add here that “The Season…”, which appeared recently in Passengers Journal, is part of a sequence of poems responding to our current crisis; she is also at work on a memoir.