Sunday Rest
shermanalexie.substack.com
Sunday Rest
a poem with a long audio introduction that includes Liam Neeson, Blue Angels fighter jets, peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, testosterone, and nostalgia.
You hit the snooze button and kick back the sheets because your bedroom is too warm and you want to sleep for fifteen more minutes. And yet you can’t slumber because you’re called to remember those Sundays past when your kids woke too early and began to make joyful demands about time, place, and plan. But it’s been more than a decade since your sons bellowed into your room at dawn. So you feel stranded on this quiet Sabbath because nobody ever told you how much you’d grieve the loss of your children’s cacophony.
I love your long introduction and love being able to learn about the process of writing a poem. I am not a writer, but I am less than profession painter. Painting can be very similar. Sometimes the painting is just there. In a short amount of time it is organized, painted and done. Most of the time I spend time with thumbnail sketches; start the painting, rub out parts of it and slowly begin to lay in colors. However I may spend a long time working out details. Ummmm, creativity. I too appreciate your stories about guns. My own kids were raised in the Vietnam War time and we lived in a neighborhood with 16-20 kids, mostly boys, who loved to play war. They made guns from anything and everything. Some times a kid had a toy gun or two. They divided themselves into teams and played war. When all were dead they got up and started over! It was a time when a lot of parents were very worried about the gun play...but as your friend said, I too have seen young boys turn a piece of toast into a gun and shoot at other kids. I also watched a group of grown men at a child's birthday party that happened to be at beautiful Puget Sound overlook, slowly drift to the edge and pretend to shoot enemies coming up the straight! I couldn't believe it! Something in the gene pool?
Man, parenthood is so exhausting and you just crave time to sleep, time to think your own thoughts. But when they leave home, you realize that the focus they brought, the meaning and the fierce protectiveness that came with parenthood was a profound devotion. After they leave every other endeavor seems small and contrived.