Pavarotti’s Last Show

The final version of my sixth (and final) poem for CRW 2300.

Pavarotti’s Last Show
By Sarah Madsen

At the Turin Olympics
no voice shook the snow
that settled on my eyes
like dust.

I almost hear
you pretending,
him pretending…
I pretend—

productivity and promise

i’m sitting at Bourbon Street coffee with Delane. we’ve been here studying for a number of hours now. It’s been a fairly productive and enjoyable day. I took my Florida Teachers’ Certificate Exam this morning from 8am until 2:30pm. By grace I was able to wake up at 7:30am this morning, and the exam was a watered-down version of the FCAT.

last night was brilliant!! I went to an Oh Fortuna/Band Marino concert at the Reitz Union. It was a 3 + hours of pure unadultered indie-awesome music bliss. and then afterwards Delane and I hung around and talked with the band until about midnight. beautiful.

as this semester has come to a close, I am slowly emerging from my cocoon of darkness. I have yet to fully adjust myself to the bright light, but things look hopeful.

I’ve decided that this craziness i’ve been experiencing as of late is part of an obligatory pruning that I must go through–a preparation from the transition from winter to spring. with any luck, the flowers will be more colorful and even more abundant than in the past…

God has granted me grace. My math professor is working with me to ensure that I have the greatest possible chance of getting the grade I need. My friends have been a constant encouragement, and even the continual check-ups from my family haven’t been as annoying as they might have seemed in the past.

I’m praying I can pull through the next two weeks. With any luck, summer will pan out perfectly. I still need to figure out summer classes and possible jobs.

A definately area of my life that needs tweaking: taking things one at a time. Balancing acts on trapeeze wires become harder the more things you juggle.

As of next year, I shall be an English minor. It shall be my area of escape, my en gedi.

Poetry is coming to a close this year, and although I shall miss it terribly, I hope that the coming semesters afford even greater opportunity to improve my work!

…Right now there’s so much going through my brain and no filter or method for its organization, so for now, I will bid my writing adieu, and return when perhaps I have something interesting and less random to spout…

Sanctuary

The final version of my third poem for CRW 2300.

Sanctuary

Climb the marble stairs to the church
that is no more a church, but a museum.
Tour the windows of stained glass
as they recolor history in your eyes.
Stay left as you pass through the doors and
see the garden guarded heavily
by angels, whose swords flash back and forth.
Turn around, around again with Moses—
leave the desert—forty years
is too long to travel by camel and caravan.
Let your feet move along the wall
where the Jordan flows and cross the aisle
flanked by wooden pews, like
boats beside a shoreline. Observe the crowds
that gather at the banks at the baptism
waiting for the holy dove to descend. Continue
to the olive tree at Gethsemane;
you seek asylum under the branches,
but tonight they are restless.
“With a kiss?” Run back out the door;
find the coin purse on the steps.

Nursery Rhyme

The final edit of my second poem for CRW 2300.

Nursery Rhyme

Oh heart with so few beats
beneath your gentle frame:
don’t rebel against your lullabies;
let your eyes surrender in sleep.

The stars flicker and tease
as they carousel ‘round the world
in revelry; the sun’s reprisal
chases them eternally.

Mockingbirds and goodnight moons,
renegade dishes followed closely
by dreams of lemon mornings…
I was more lost than Alice in her
spoon-silver looking glass.

the incurable disease

the worst disease is not the one you cannot diagnose, but the one for wich you know all about-and for which you know exactly must be done to eradicate it-but which you cannot cure.

There is nothing quite so helpless, i have found, than knowing exactly what is wrong with you, and being absolutely powerless to do anything about it. Or at least anything significant.

This is how i felt for the past couple of months.

My life has been (forgive the trite, cliche example…) a rollercoaster. NO, not even a rollercoaster-rather, a seemingly endless plunge into a bottomless pit. [yes, I am aware of the redundancy embodied in that statement.]

To bore you with the gory details would be inhumane; a few of you have braved the waters of that conversation, and for your ears, i thank you. It is wonderful to have supportive friends who know the gift of listening, and I only wish that this kind of compassion was put to more use in my life.

Here’s the skinny: I’ve been pretty depressed lately. It’s not a depressed like I need a prescription, or I’m in danger of harming myself… But these past couple of months have seen days when I don’t want to wake up in the morning (and no, I’m not sleepy…). But I can’t sleep. And mornings when I can’t stand myself–not just in the mirror. But days when I could be surrounded by thousands, and yet feel as if I were adrift in an empty ocean. My raft has a leak, and I feel the water reaching my ankles, knees…neck…

Have you ever had every reason to be happy, and yet for some reason your life just seems to have no satisfaction? Yeah–that’s it.

To say I am alone in this feeling would be completely self-absorbent, I realize, and at the same time, I feel completely alone in much of this.

Life right now for me lacks passion, interest, joy. Unadultered Joy–oh how you tease me with your smile! It has been suggested to me that perhaps change would be nice…or maybe it is that I’m not being challenged enough. My reply is perhaps, yes…you may be right. But the problem with change is that it is so easy to loose yourself. I have lost myself. Too many times really… Change (in times of trouble) is like when as a child and we clean our rooms, we simply “re-arrange” things so that they look different; oh how flawed our attempts to fool our parents and ourselves!

It is easy to dismiss times of trouble (while in college) as simply “mid-semester blahs,” and guarantee ourselves and those around us that once summer rolls around, or Christmas break arrives that we will have a much needed rest and come back swinging. At least until the next mid-semester blahs bought comes around. Mid-semester blahs…mid-life crisis…any correlation? I’m seeing a trend and that is that we too often write off our problems as trivial “time-periods” in an attempt to escape confrontation–confrontation with ourselves.

And like Pavlov’s dogs, we have been conditioned–our response of “fine” follows any and every “how are you-esque” question… We fear accountability for our actions. We hate admitting that we don’t have complete control of the situation. I know I do. It’s not even a matter of saving face–I’m not that wonderful, and I don’t care if people know I’m not perfect.

(Heck-it’s almost a stumbling block (as a Christian)-admitting you’re not perfect. We want to admit that we’re not perfect people, almost as a reverse-psychological statement. It’s not hard to say that you’re stressed, and that you don’t have a 4.0 or that you’ve not been overly happy lately; but saying that your day-to-day is dark and dismal and that you feel alone and hopeless or far from God-now that’s something that no one really needs to hear now, is it? That’s the lie we feed ourselves. Though perhaps it’s not entirely too far from the truth. “How are you”s have been reduced to simple hellos that are exchanged by mere acquaintances at the check out counter at the grocery store. Who honestly (more often casually) asks that question wanting you to dump all of your baggage in there lap?)

While there are exceptions to these (rather disparaging) rules I have so brazenly mocked, they are not the cure-all to my madness.

Granted, the conversation, prayers and support of those I have talked to have served very much as the lolipop that lessens the pain of a child’s scraped knee. (Or in my case: festering wound)

I’ve met with a counselor here at the school, and his assesment of my situation was this: that perhaps I’m blessed and cursed with being wise. In other words–i know exactly what’s going on, but don’t quite know what to do. My illness is an oxymoron.

He said perhaps that “God was in the details” of this wierd and complex conundrum of my life.

God is always in the details, but perhaps this is His way of getting my attention.

At RUF last week, Steve Lammers spoke of “growing pains” and how they are organic, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll just magically or mechanically solve themselves.

The source of my feelings and troubles is not rooted in one particular awful cause, but rather looks like a brainstorming paper covered in millions of lines leading to other smaller boxes.

Numbness is perhaps the most overwhelming feeling (haha…feeling, how ironic) flowing through me at the moment. I have know problem with conviction-with knowledge-but with feeling, I am helpless. Ultimately, I know that this low-point will not have a long-term negative effect on my life, and I know that my life rests in Christ, but at the same time, simply the knowledge is not as much of a comfort as the feeling of hope. I want to feel alive–I want to feel love and joy and contentment and a passion for everything. I want to feel Christ present within me.

So here I am–the incurable disease.

Incurable by my own prescriptions and medications.

I am a cancer patient dying to find treatment.

But there is promise of medical breakthrough–of a Science beyond imagination. I am struggling to learn about it, and struggling to maintain hope.