Haven

by Jane Elsdon

The Shaman in the Poem: Process and Healing in Their Own Time

We are told that thirty thousand years ago tribal poets entrusted local history and experience to memory.  Memory soon translated into the oral word and was shared  with other tribes. Perhaps through long evolution this is how the healing affects of poetry became apparent.  What we do know is that such a keeper of oral history eventually became known as shaman.  Was it sham? Was it magic? I'll leave that to you to determine. What I share with you this month is my own personal experience.

For those interested in the process of poetry, I will tell you this. My father died on Christmas night 1950 by his own hand. This was a traumatic event for a fifteen year old girl, so in my attempt to survive it I stuffed it away, never suspecting how it might eventually emerge.  Then in the mid-seventies the first stanza gave itself to me. I scribbled it down and tucked it away, knowing that it was significant but knowing, too, I wasn't yet ready for the rest of the work. Then in 1979 as I was growing in self-confidence, trust, and understanding it all came together and poured forth in a breathtaking breakthrough catharsis. I shared it with my writers group in Los Osos and they decided they wanted to be the first to publish it. It appeared in SOUNDINGS, an anthology, at Christmastime in 1980 and sold out shortly after the holidays.  In the early 90s a poetry chapbook containing it, entitled Shadow Work, garnered an Honorable Mention in Pudding House Publications annual Looking Glass Competition, was published by them in 1993, and is still available from them.

In the months – and even years – afterward amazing things began to happen. At the most unexpected times and in the most unlikely places, people came to me with stories about the poem.  A local social worker, nurses, and school teachers who had used the poem when working with those they had counseled told of life changing healing effects for their clients, patients, students, and themselves. A friend told me of losing her brother to suicide and related that somehow the poem caused her to release long-held guilt for not having saved him from his choice.

Most startling of all came what happened when I sat in a restaurant on the embarcadero in Monterey with an old friend and her cousin, whom I met only at that luncheon. Soon after we were introduced he opened his mouth and quoted to me the first two stanzas of my poem. To say my mouth dropped open is an understatement. He confessed he had been an absentee father, blithely riding his motorcycle up and down the coast of California for many years. Then, the year before, someone close to him gave him my chapbook for Christmas. “I started keeping a journal soon after I read the poem,” he told me. “I never thought they might be interested in me.” To this day it amazes and humbles me.

It's understandable, then, that I think of the gift in the poem as the shaman in the poem. Not sham, nor magic. I call it the grace of the great invisible, the grace of the universe on our mysterious evolutionary journey. May the gift of that grace warm your holidays and winter solstice, too.

They named you Haven:  (A noun, but never proper).   harbor, port; 2.  A place of safety; asylum.     yet you didn't find one. If you were to be port, place of safety,   your hell-raising, whiskey-slugging     Irish father was storm;   your righteous French-English mother     a tanker riding you both. I looked for you in Mother's mementos,   but she had burned them indiscriminately,     later regretting it. I read your notes, cryptic entries on   backs of old snapshots. I duplicated her portraits of you,   from infancy on,     sat them on shelves,       hoping to find you, and still I dream of discovering your journal,   a path I could follow     back into your mind. I remember you.  Oh, yes.   Always fresh-scrubbed, you smelled of     shaving lotion,       sometimes whiskey,         sometimes brew,     and always of Lucky Strikes and Sen-Sens. Your eyes were blue, tender and tormented. Your rage I recall most vividly,   so fierce, violent. Toward the end I was its focus,    I understand, now, that locus. It's hell when your child sees   more than you yourself can bear. You were born too soon, you know;   before prime time TV commercials offering     hot tips to guide you,       hot tubs to relax you,         hotlines to save you. Now, locking a child in his darkened room,   holding séances within his hearing,     would be considered,       child abuse. And what twenty-two-year-old man   would submit to his father's brutal beating     because he'd secretly borrowed the car       to meet a girl his parents disapproved? Your mother never knew herself,   much less you, did she?     I'll wager she called it love       when she paid your pregnant wife         a stealthy visit,       shared her secret potions for abortions,         and gave her a picture of the girl you           should have married; And when, during the depression,   her influence bought you     a place on the police force and       a crisp blue uniform. When your artist's sensibilities were   bludgeoned senseless by     waterfront brawls, knife wounds,       gun battles and bloody corpses, you withdrew to numb your wounds   with alcohol's sedation. The physical wounds healed,   but it was already too late     for psychic wounds,       professional and financial wounds. You used your fine mind to drive a truck   when police work proved too wild,     anything for a paycheck       to feed your wife and almost-child. How one small family could be   such a magnet for violence     challenges understanding.

Did it challenge yours that snowy night   your conductor-father     fell beneath the train and was brought home in a rubber bag,   like a puzzle beyond     solution? Too late your mother died   her prolonged torturous death,     leaving the uncut umbilical cord       to finish the job she had begun. Yet you still believed in fairy tales,   or at least The Great Escape.     They failed you, too. It wasn't easy to be Prince Charming,   or Houdini,     or even Pauline. But you were our cosmic Santa Claus,   our ultimate Easter Bunny. Out of three-hundred-sixty-five days   of distress you gave us a few days of plenty;   always as much as you could. Now, in the hollow, hovering silence   stirs another holiday season. I sit alone, gathering strength   to sustain another Christmas,     your favorite time of year,       your very favorite day, for you believed, at least on that day,   anything was possible. Lights flicker festively on the tree.   Stockings hang on the fireplace,     as you always dreamed of. (Remember the cardboard fireplace   You built to hang     our socks on?  You covered it       with brick crepe paper. Your favorite song, White Christmas,   sung by your favorite singer, the crooner,     of course, echoes in my ears. And, as I do every year,   I bought a poinsettia for you today.     Enthroned in wicker, it blooms flamboyantly. Remember how they delighted you when   we came from Indiana?      Immodest scarlet women        flaunting their beauty. You were unaccustomed to such honesty   and you loved them. It has been nearly three decades   since you gave us that last     fairy tale Christmas       with the Dracula denouement and you still dominate my holidays   like Vincent Price,     Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,       and Jesus Christ. I hated you for a while.   Though I still can't admit it,     I must have, snuffing yourself out that way.   Such irrevocable flight     that long ago Christmas night. I know, now, you meant it as a gift. You thought it the only way to save us   from your pain,     your ferocious rages,       convulsions at your planetary core. When you gave up your life,   it wasn't as in death, was it?     But as in birth. Your dying breaths were labor pains   bringing forth our freedom from such rages. Oh, why were there no sages   to offer you another solution?

I am old enough now,   enough battered by life     to understand pain,       isolation,         desperation, to perceive something of what you endured,   what you loved,     and what you feared. Also, to understand what   drove you to such lengths. And I know   all suicides do not lack strength. Yours was a gift. This is not my rationalization,   my impotent attempt to romanticize     and accept an unacceptable event. As I have garnered more and more knowledge   of you and your background,     it is something I have learned in       my blood and bones,   in those inaccessible zones     perceived finally only by spirit. Your Christmas sacrifice   was not intended to punish,     assign guilt or accusation,       or even as escape. It was your gift,   your ultimate gift. Still I wonder how you might have flourished   had you been planted in healthy, fertile soil     free of superstitious scarecrows       and lethal emotional pesticides. You were too gentle to survive   locked in dark rooms, too vulnerable to thrive   on Irish anger and French-English accusation. I picture my beautiful family.   You don't know them – or do you?     You've missed so much – or have you? Sometimes I think I sense your presence. For decades after that Christmas   when I was fifteen     I sought some insight, revelation,       that wouldn't sentence you to         purgatory or hell. Now I know they don't exist,   except right here,     and you've already served your time. Although by majority it would be denied,   lately     I wonder, isn't every death,   finally,     suicide? Haven:  (A noun, but never proper).   1:  Harbor, port;   2:  A place of safety, asylum. Father, I hope you have at last found yours.

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