Ana Darcy Méndez is generally calm and sweet-tempered. Well, almost always. We surely know people who are angered by injustice, or whose heartstrings can be twanged by sentiment. Such feelings make us fully human. Ana's daily life on our planet passes much like the lives of the rest of us, but sometimes something will strike her deeply, and stab her with pangs of emotion. Sometimes that stab comes from poetry--the economy and insights reach her much more directly than our longer literary forms, which are harder for her to register in their totality.
A poem by Mark Jarman, "Prayer for Our Daughters," made her eyes tear up. Like many of the poems in her growing collection of favorites, there's nothing in it that needs explaining by a person with a degree in English (like her husband). It's perfectly clear as is. If you know Ana and her history at all, you know she loves children, and especially girls. She loves all the poet's lines about daughters: "If they forget themselves, may it be in music/Or the kind of prayer that makes a garden of thinking," and "... may they find themselves, as we have found them/Complete at each stage of their lives, each part they add to."
"Prayer for Our Daughters," by Mark Jarman
(Sample more of Ana's favorite poems in the column to the right, under the photo of the LOVE sculpture.)
No comments:
Post a Comment