My very wise confessor, who is privy to all the angst and pain that is housed in my heart and soul, gives this advice when going through a dark night, “Persevere! Keep praying and going through the motions. Eventually you will find your way back. It is often the dark night that is a test to see if you will be steadfast.” I am still wandering in the dark. The presence of the Lord in my life is ellusive and so his advice I take with faith and hope that at the other end my love and I will find each other again. In the meantime I find bits of comfort that I convince myself are crusts of bread dropped like a trail that I must follow and one of them is this new poet that I have discovered. He of course is not a new poet but one long dead, yet still new to me.
I just discovered a new poetic love, Paul Laurence Dunbar. I had never read his work before but am now totally enamored with not only the man but with his literary talent. I downloaded one of his collections into my kindle and was thrilled to read the following excerpt from the introduction; “The world is too old now, and I find myself too much of its mood, to care for the work of a poet because he is black, because his father and mother were slaves, because he was, before and after he began to write poems, an elevator-boy. These facts would certainly attract me to himas a man, if I knew him to have a literary ambition, but when it came to his literary art, I must judge it irrespective of these facts, and enjoy or endure it for what it was in itself.” W.D. Howells
LIFE
A crust of bread and a corner to sleep in,
A minute to smile and an hour to weep in,
A pint of joy to a peck of trouble,
And never a laugh but the moans come double;
… And that is life!
A crust and a corner that love makes precious,
With a smile to warm and the tears to refresh us;
And joy seems sweeter when cares come after,
And a moan is the finest of foils for laughter;
And that is life! Paul Laurence Dunbar
Comments (2)
A crust of bread nd a corner to sleep in, the basics, I like .
“That is life.” I’ve also heard “never doubt in the darkness what your learned in the light.”
It’s hard not to doubt when you’re in the darkness, but He is there with you even though you can’t see or feel Him.