[MUSIC] >> The following poems follow the chronology of my life and were chosen as important to me along the journey.

Thank you for taking the time to listen to me and to help Jo and me in our endeavor to provide food for hungry children.

I am neither a published or polished poet.

My poetry is primarily free verse, and I hope most of the people to whom I will present this reading, and who know me from my long career in education and government, will enjoy or even be challenged to contemplate life's beginnings and endings by hearing these poems read.

[MUSIC] >> Glenn Poshard Don McLean, in his classic American Pie, asked a question can music save your very soul?

For me, music and poetry have been the bridge between my soul and reflections on the great questions of life and the hereafter.

Why am I here?

What's my purpose in life?

Where am I going?

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

A long way from whom?

A long way from home.

Swing low, sweet chariot.

Coming for to carry me home.

Swing low.

Sweet chariot coming for to carry me home.

Some glad morning.

When this life is over.

I'll fly away.

To a home on God's celestial shore.

I'll fly away, I'll fly away.

Oh glory.

I'll fly away in the morning when I die.

Hallelujah.

By and by I'll I'll fly away.

Well, the first two songs I heard for the first time in a small black church in the little village of Monti, Illinois, which sat on the banks of the Wabash River.

My sister and her husband lived right down the street from the church.

And when Mom and Dad took me there as a small boy to visit, we would sometimes attend the church and love the music and the sermons.

The last song I learned as a child in the Little Baptist church in the hill country of southeastern Illinois, where I grew up, seems like a lot of the music and poetry I grew up with talked about the transition from this life to the next.

Maybe the music and the poetry helped save our soul from the abject poverty of these poor communities.

And so we sang about walking up the streets of glory, shouting on the hills, casting a watchful eye across the Jordan.

Where milk and honey flowed forever.

So I want to share with you that transition between beginnings and endings and the questions of life that it poses to me and perhaps to you.

This reading is about contemplation and loss and the sometimes joy that makes up for all of it.

Hunger.

What happened?

Dad?

What happened?

That you couldn't meet my eyes when you set the powdered milk?

The £5 bag of flour, the slab of bacon, the cans of pork and beans on the kitchen table.

What happened?

What humiliation did you have to suffer this time to feed your kids?

Did the township supervisors words drip with judgment, making you feel unworthy as he put the government surplus in your sack?

Were you thinking on the walk home, cradling the food in your one arm?

That I would see the hurt in your eyes and not the courage in your heart.

It was exactly two and a half miles from our little four room bungalow, up in the hills to the village grade school, and every day my sister Jolene and I made that walk, the walk.

I've always loved my walking home from the grade school we attended a couple miles away.

We stopped to wait in Weasel Creek, flowing swiftly from the fresh spring rains.

The wildflowers were thick along the gravel road to our house.

Their fragrance mingling with that of the sassafras roots and the sweet smell of clover on the last day of school.

We were allowed to stop in the village general store and buy a treat to savor on our way home.

The store bought candies were a poor second to the bluebells and the dogwoods and the fields of clover.

Every day on that walk, we shared poems.

We both loved Edna Saint Vincent Millay's God's World and would recite it to each other on those fleeting days of laughter in May.

We were kids, loving the woods and the flowers and the sweet fragrance of life that was all around us.

Four years later, on a sunny May afternoon, I lost you to a speeding semi.

You were engaged to be married after your high school graduation the last week of May.

Recently, I visited the old home place after being away for many years.

I walked the road again from our house to the old schoolhouse in the village.

I'm sure you know the meadow just past the bridge over Weasel Creek sports its exuberant yellow plumage, and the bluebells are scattered liberally throughout the woods along the road.

Wisteria climbed some of the abandoned fence posts where barbed wire used to be.

I think of you often these days, and the pure novice love we shared with each other in those days of our youth I have kept it in my heart.

Have you ever been overcome by the beauty of God's creation and felt the joy of it well up in your heart, and then, almost in a moment, have it dissolve into the deep pain of loss?

Karl Menninger, one of America's great psychiatrists, tells us that in that moment when pain takes away our joy, we either choose to grow or we choose to die.

Mom and dad didn't give us a lot of things growing up.

They didn't have a lot of things to give, but they did give us a sense of cooperation and contribution to the family's good, which helped us feel we belonged.

Mom's gift to me was the garden.

Leaves from the pine oak falling softly across the lawn.

The full moon coming up slowly over the pond.

Memories of you even now, in my 60s.

At this time of year, planning the garden would have been first on our agenda.

Long rows of tomatoes and green beans and onions and potatoes.

You and your sun bonnet and long dress.

Bending over the garden hoe.

Me placing the potato slips in the mounds.

Bareheaded and shirtless in the sun.

Hands and knees in the mud.

Day after day.

Of hoeing and weeding and watering.

Waiting patiently for our spring ritual to begin at six in the morning.

We would walk in the garden.

The sun coming up and pick two red ripened tomatoes.

Still cool from the morning dew.

We'd sit on the edge of the porch, salt shakers in hand, enjoying the fruits of our garden, greeting the morning sun, talking about the Sunday school lesson at the Chapman's Grove General Baptist Church a few Christmases ago at the family gathering.

Madeline, Ed and I asked the same question what would.

What did we remember most about you?

Rattling pans at 430 in the morning to get dad off to work and hurting us all off to church on Sunday was easy, but I was the only one who remembered the garden because it was just for me.

Your own special gift to me.

Sitting here on the porch, listening to the chorus of crickets in the woods along the pond.

And I miss you.

And the moon and the pine oak.

Miss you too.

My mother gave me many black and white answers to life's questions, many rooted in her faith, which affected me both positively and negatively my whole life, causing me much pain and yet giving me much peace.

But regardless, I can never get away from the words of Ted Kooser's beautiful poem, mother, because I am her son and I am tied to her soul forever.

Mother.

mid-April already and the wild plums bloom at the roadside.

A lacy white against the exuberant, jubilant green of new grass.

And the dusty, fading black of burned out ditches.

No leaves.

Not yet.

Only the delicate star petaled blossoms sweet with their timeless perfume.

You've been gone a month today.

And have missed three rains and one night long watch for tornadoes.

I sat in the cellar from 6 to 8 while fat spring clouds went somersaulting, rumbling east.

Then it poured a storm that walked on legs of lightning, dragging its shaggy belly over the fields.

The meadowlarks are back and the finches are turning from green to gold.

Those same two geese have come to the pond again this year, honking in over the trees, splashing down.

They never nest but stay a week or two than leave.

The peonies are up, the red sprouts burning in circles like birthday candles.

For this is the month of my birth.

As you know, the best month to be born in.

Thanks to you.

Everything ready to burst with living.

There will be no more new flannel night shirts sewn on your old black singer.

No birthday card addressed in a shaky but businesslike hand.

You ask me if I would be sad when it happened.

And I am sad.

But the iris I moved from your house.

Now hold in the dusty, dry fist of their roots.

Green knives and forks.

As if waiting for dinner.

As if spring were a feast.

I thank you for that.

Were it not for the way you taught me to look at the world, to see the life at play in everything.

I would have to be lonely forever.

While my mother could be black and white about many things, but tied me together with bonds of love.

My dad was never black and white about anything except his politics.

He had only one arm and he had gotten a job during the depression as a water boy on a road construction crew with the WPA, and he became a dyed in the wool Roosevelt Democrat.

Dad was a giver.

He found a way to help everybody.

Friends.

Neighbors.

Family.

Dad was always there to help, to give everything down to his last nickel.

But there was one thing he couldn't give the words to say.

I love you to his children.

The porch.

Uncle Jo parked his 1954 yellow Chevrolet truck on the gravel road leading past the barn lot and came through the gate.

He asked you if you needed any help and your reply was no.

The boy here helps me.

He's about the only help I've got.

I was 13.

Four years later I joined the Army on my 17th birthday.

I had to catch a train to Saint Louis at 4:00 in the morning.

I had never been away from home.

Mom cooked breakfast for me and mostly kept her face toward the stove, crying quietly.

You sat on the front porch completely in the dark, except for one small sliver of light from the kitchen falling across the far end of the porch.

I hugged mom goodbye and stepped out onto the porch.

I held my hand out into the darkness and felt your one hand brush me shoulder high.

It lingered for the briefest moment, like the beginning of a lover's touch.

You told me to take care of myself.

Years later, when I was in my early 30s and you were about to die, the ingrate in me asked you if you had ever loved me.

I think I broke your heart.

The barn lot and the porch ought to have been enough.

We tell ourselves, even when we don't hear the words, it's actions that count.

They speak louder than words.

But do they?

What if we have to know?

And the question itself is It's just too dangerous to utter.

Just as Mom and Dad grieved the death of my sister Jolene down the road a half mile, Uncle Pete and Eileen grieved the death of Dennis, a son, a gifted athlete, my best friend, the first to die in Vietnam from our county.

Washed in the blood of the red, white and blue.

Now forever young.

To an athlete dying young.

The time you won your town.

The race we cheered you through the marketplace.

Men and boys stood cheering by as home.

We brought you shoulder high today.

The road all runners come shoulder high.

We bring you home and set you at your threshold down.

Townsmen of a stellar town.

Smart lad.

To slip betimes away from fields where glory does not stay.

And early though the laurel grows.

It withers quicker than the rose eyes.

The shady night hath shut.

Cannot see the record cut and silence sounds no worse than shears.

After earth has stopped the ears.

Now you will not swell the rout of lads that wore their honours.

Out of men whom renown outran.

And the name died before the man so set before its echoes fade.

That fleet foot upon the sill of shade.

And hold there to the low lintel up that still defended challenge Cup.

And round.

Those early laurel heads will flock to gaze the strengthless dead.

And find an withered on his curls a Garland briefer than the girls.

The old folks say it's not natural.

The transition is meant for us.

We should be the first to go, not the young.

Wars don't care about the natural order of the transition.

They just don't care.

College comes along, a career starts.

Marriage.

Kids take over our lives.

Before we know it, we've begun to climb some necessary.

We believe ladder to success.

But we take care to be there.

To watch, to cheer.

Maybe the most important transition of our lives.

Our children.

Biff the friendly purple bear.

Now I was a play horse you pulled with a string.

On wheels where my legs should be.

And he was the boy that pulled the toy.

Around the tree house tree.

And for the longest time it was just us two.

The boy and the toy.

That was me.

Until the day the Purple Bear came to live in the tree house tree.

I was tied by a string.

Neath the long rope swing.

In a field with a make believe farm.

When around the corner came the boy and the bear.

Marching arm in arm.

This is Biff, said the boy.

He's a friendly purple bear, an old Biff.

He reached down and stroked my paw with a paw of purple hair.

Biff's come to stay, said the boy, to pretend with me and you.

And he can do anything that.

A boy and a toy believe a purple bear can do and taken the cue.

Oh, Biff!

He bowed from the waist and leaped in the air and clicked his heels.

Then down to the ground with three somersaults that ended up in four cartwheels.

He whirled and he twirled, and he stood on his head and the boy giggled and slapped his thighs.

And I laughed so hard that wooden tears rolled down my painted eyes.

So Biff came to stay in the tree house tree and long summer days came without an end for the boy and the toy and the purple bear.

And serious games of.

Pretend like the cowboy game where the boys as sheriff and Biff as the Bandit King.

It always seemed to end with the outlaws down in the jail by the long rope swing.

And you know, there was this great pony race that lasted for days around the flower bed, Boy, that was a tough one.

Lucky for us, though, I won by a wooden head.

And then one day we entered the pirate's cove beneath a bush on the alley side.

An old biff.

He had a sword and a paper hat and a patch over one purple eye.

And there was always the danger of outlaws or creatures from outer space.

And without the courage of the three of us, well, we might have lost the whole darn place.

But we were bound by the code of the Musketeers.

Such golden hours were shared by the freckle faced boy and the wooden horse toy and bib, the friendly purple bear.

But as summers passed, the boy grew tall and his voice took a strange new ring.

And his visits to the treehouse tree were few.

And he never came to the Long rope swing.

Biff the purple bear grew sad as he climbed down from the tree house tree.

He shook his head.

I'm afraid, he said.

He's forgotten you and me.

It seems old wooden friend of mine that we've outlasted his boyhood years.

And he turned and was gone across the lawn in a trail of purple chairs.

Now I've been put out to pasture in the old tree house tree.

But at times I've seen from afar a strange tall boy who mows the lawn and tinkers with some old car.

But just today I saw a new little boy coming down the sidewalk.

And I swear he was headed straight for me in the tree house tree.

Followed by Biff, that old friendly purple bear.

Did it come too quickly for us?

That strange tall boy tinkering with some old car.

That little girl putting away the dollhouse and walking across the stage to receive her degree.

Did it come too soon?

Sunrise.

Sunset.

Sunrise.

Sunset.

Quickly fly the years.

One season following another.

Layered with happiness and tears.

After serving in the Illinois State Senate for a number of years, I was elected to Congress the night before President George H.W.

Bush's inauguration in January of 1989.

I had gone down to the Vietnam Wall to visit my cousin Dennis.

It was a quiet but emotional time for my family and me.

The next day, sitting directly behind President Bush on Inauguration Day, looking straight down the mall, all the way past the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam Wall, my increasingly pacifist conscience penned the following poem, The Wall.

Sitting here, seeing there his name on the wall.

My name in the hall.

The president's words rang clear past the spire down the mall.

No more names on the wall.

Lord, make it so.

And let Denny know I see his wall from here.

Hand on the Bible.

Oh so old frozen words in the winter's cold.

Under old Abe's gaze the ghost appear.

Bending heads softly.

The words to hear.

Young soldiers all heard the nations call.

Now hear the president's words.

Shooting down the mall they nod.

Consent to word the wall.

No more names, no more walls.

Where have all the young men gone?

Long time passing.

Where have all the young men gone?

Long time ago.

Where have all the young men gone?

Gone to soldiers.

Everyone.

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

After four years in Congress, three federal judges in Chicago eliminated my congressional district.

And I was forced to run in a primary in a congressional district stretching nearly 200 miles north and 120 miles wide.

If I wanted to stay in Congress, it was the most difficult decision I could ever make.

I loved Congress, I loved serving 80% of the new district I had never served in, and the incumbent congressman had been in office 14 years and lived in the most populated end of the district.

It was an impossible task and I was told by everyone.

Don't run, you can't win.

But I had the best campaign manager that money couldn't buy my son Dennis.

I had Jo and I had my book of Robert Frost poems.

The night before the deadline to file the next day, I kept reading Frost's poem reluctance.

Out through the fields and the woods and over the walls I have winded.

I've climbed the hills of view.

And looked at the world and descended.

I have come by the highway home.

And lo, it has ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground.

Save those that the oak is keeping to Ravel them one by one, and let them go scraping and creeping out over the crusted snow.

When others are sleeping and the dead leaves lie huddled and still no longer blown hither and thither, the last lone aster is gone.

The flowers of the witch hazel wither.

The heart is still aching to seek.

But the feet question whither I went to the heart of man.

Was it ever less than a treason.

To go with the drift of things.

To yield.

With a grace to reason and bow and accept the end of a love or a season.

The next day I announce my candidacy.

And we won the impossible race.

Life is full of these moments.

What regrets do our hearts hold?

Who talked us out of it, told us to be reasonable.

The dream was just too high a price to pay.

The years flew by in Congress.

I worked hard, never missed committees, never miss votes, passed important legislation.

Loved debate.

Traveled the world.

And Jo asked me when it was all over.

What were you left with in the end?

What mattered the most?

And I remembered all the nights I couldn't sleep.

And I would drive down to the Lincoln Memorial and sit there on the steps, pondering the wisdom and the poetry of his second inaugural address.

The war was nearly over.

The decisive victory at Gettysburg meant the union would survive.

Thousands gathered at the nation's capital to hear the recently re-elected president's second inaugural address.

Many wanted to hear.

Expected to hear words of retribution, of punishment for the South, who had taken hundreds of thousands of young lives in this uncivil war.

Here is what they heard from the greatest statesman in the history of the world, with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.

Let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

No talk of retribution, no talk of hatred.

No talk of division.

No talk of enemies from our greatest president.

If the conscience of our nation is dulled by the unquenchable thirst for power and wealth, and the soul of our nation is void of compassion and mercy and love, then will we hear his voice again.

Will we summon up his words out of the darkness, or will our democracy transition from life to death?

Will our children not know that we were once the shining city on a hill.

I had a great friend in Congress.

His name was John Lewis.

We spent much time together.

John was wise.

He championed nonviolence as a means of gaining equality for all of our people.

We prayed for our country where John and I believed in America.

When we stood together and put our hand over our heart and pledged allegiance.

We believed in one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

And I would sometimes see this black man standing beside me, the grandson of slaves, with a tear in his eyes When John passed in 2020, we went to each of the 39 counties I had represented in Congress, and we marched around each courthouse to remind our people that violence is never the answer to America's problems.

I wrote a poem about Jefferson, who gave us our declaration and our Constitution about Lincoln, who held our family together in the worst of times.

And about John Lewis, the conscience of our Congress.

A reminder, Thomas, are we not a nation that's free?

Not when you forget the Declaration's decree.

Abraham.

It seems the nation does mourn.

Small wonder when charity and love are forlorn.

Abraham, what wisdom to impart.

A nation so divided and torn.

Strive on to finish the work.

You're in a just and lasting peace among yourselves.

Reborn.

John.

Most violent words fly.

Another war to fight.

Only love and forgiveness unite.

John, you were broken on the bridge I forgave.

I carried on.

What legacy do you leave us now, my friend?

March on, March on in love and forgiveness.

March on.

Growing up as a young man, my joy and life was baseball.

I wanted to be a baseball coach when I grew up, and after high school and the army, I started to see you got my degree, started teaching and coaching baseball.

My heroes growing up were Stan Musial, Ken Boyer, Bob Gibson, and Lou Brock.

And as I got older into middle age, a guy named Bart Giamatti, the president of Yale University who resigned the presidency to become the commissioner of Major League Baseball.

He was someone I admired greatly.

I played on the congressional baseball team, and each year we had a celebrity guest at our charity game.

And this particular year, the guest was Bart Giamatti, my hero, the commissioner of Major League Baseball.

When the game was over and the crowd had left, I walked with him to his car and just before he got in his car, he signed my brand new Rawlings baseball that I had brought to the game with me.

Not long after, I picked up the Washington Post and the headline read Giamatti Dead of Heart Attack.

He was only 51.

I wept, remembering the beautiful prose that he had written about this wonderful game of life and baseball, he wrote.

It breaks your heart.

It's designed to break your heart.

The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings.

And then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.

You count on it.

rely on it to buffer the passage of time to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive.

And then, just when the days are all twilight.

When you need it most, it stops and summer is gone.

That is why it breaks my heart, this game.

There is a rough justice in it and a reminder to all of us.

How slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one team over another in life.

It breaks my heart because it was meant to.

Because it was meant to foster in me the need that there is something abiding, some pattern that could come together to make a reality that would resist time's corrosion.

I need to think that here on this earth, at least, something lasts forever.

And for me, it's that state of being that is a game.

This game of baseball on a green field, in the gentle sun of a summer day.

And the chilling rains of autumn far in the distance.

Before we had electricity, the old battery powered radio sat between my dad and me on our front porch, tuned to KMOX in Saint Louis and Cardinal baseball.

Harry Carey would come on and he'd say, hello again, everybody, this is Harry Carey with Jo Garagiola and Jack Buck from beautiful Busch Stadium, where tonight, the Saint Louis Cardinals take on the Chicago Cubs in the first of a big three game series.

And Harry would go on and on, and dad and I would cheer and laugh.

Those moments of baseball somehow tied us together in a way that nothing on this earth could ever do.

This trip back home from Washington was one of the hardest for me, because my beloved older sister, Rose, had now passed on.

She had a hard life filled with sickness and loss.

It was on a visit to her home in Moni that I first heard in the small black church there, James Weldon Johnson's beautiful poem Go Down death and I celebrated her life with this poem.

Day before yesterday morning, the Lord was looking down from his great high heaven.

Looking down on all his children.

And the great merciful eye of the master fell on Sister Caroline Tossin on her bed of pain.

And the Lord's heart was touched with pity.

With the everlasting pity the Lord said to that tall, bright angel standing at his right side, call me death.

And that great angel lit out with a voice that resounded down the golden streets of glory.

Death.

Call me death.

Waiting way back in the shadowy corners of heaven.

O death heard the summons.

But he didn't say nary a word.

He mounted his fastest horse and he clamped his spurs to its bloodless sides.

And up the golden streets of glory.

He rode to the great white throne of the master.

And the Lord said, go down, death, go down.

Go down to Savannah, Georgia, to Yamacraw and bring me Sister Caroline.

She's labored long in the vineyard.

She's borne the heat and the burden of the day.

Go down death and bring her to me.

An old death.

He loosed the reins on that great stallion.

And down the golden streets of glory.

He rode out through the pearly gates.

On out past the morning star.

Down past the evening star.

Past suns and moons.

Oh, death came like a fallen star in the night.

And as we were gathered round her bed.

Sister Caroline looked up.

She gave us a little smile.

And she said.

I'm going home.

I'm going home.

Because, you see, Sister Caroline saw what we couldn't see.

She saw old death coming like a comet in the night.

But death.

He didn't frighten Sister Caroline.

None.

To her he looked like a welcome friend.

An old death.

He takes us to Caroline up in his icy arms.

But she didn't feel no chill.

No, sir.

He mount that great stallion and on up past the Evening Star.

On past the Morning Star.

He came past suns and moons.

To the pearly gates.

And up the golden streets of glory.

To the throne of the master.

He takes us to Caroline, and he place her in the loving arms of the Lord and the Lord.

He take his finger, and he smoothed the furrows from her brow.

He dried the tears from her eyes.

He rocked her gently in his bosom, and he kept a saying.

Sister Caroline, take your rest.

Take your rest.

Left lonesome husband, grief stricken children.

Sister Caroline is not dead.

She's only gone to be with the master.

For me it isn't just music that can save our very soul.

So can poetry.

I needed assurance that Rose's life was better now.

At peace.

No pain, no tears.

And the old black preacher in that little church.

And the great poet gave me that assurance.

A transition not to be feared.

At the end of my congressional career, I ran for governor of Illinois and lost.

But that ending was only the beginning for us.

Of a lifelong desire to help abused, neglected, and abandoned children.

For 25 years, the plight of these children has caused us more pain and brought us more joy than we could ever have imagined.

Ina Hughes, in her hauntingly beautiful poem A prayer for Our Children, paints a real picture that many of us see every day.

A prayer for our children.

We pray for our children who sneak popsicles before supper.

Who erase holes in math workbooks who can never find their shoes.

And we pray for our children who stare at photographers from behind barbed wire, who can't bow down the street in a new pair of sneakers, who never counted potatoes, who are born in places where we wouldn't be caught dead.

Who never go to the circus.

Who live in an X-rated world.

We pray for children who bring us sticky kisses and fistfuls of dandelions, who sleep with the cat and bury goldfish, who hug us in a hurry and forget their lunch money, who squeeze toothpaste all over the sink.

Who slurp their soup.

And we pray for those children who never get dessert.

Who have no safe blanket to drag behind them, who watch their parents watch them die, who can't find any bread to steal, who don't have any rooms to clean up, whose pictures aren't on anybody's dresser.

Whose monsters are real.

We pray for children who spend all their allowance before Tuesday, who throw tantrums in the grocery store and pick at their food, who like ghost stories, who shove dirty clothes under the bed and never rinse out the tub, who get visits from the tooth fairy, who don't like to be kissed in front of the carpool, who squirm in church or temple and scream in the phone.

Whose tears we sometimes laugh at and who smiles can make us cry.

And we pray for those children whose nightmares come in the daytime, who will eat anything, who have never seen a dentist.

Who aren't spoiled by anybody.

Who go to bed hungry and cry themselves to sleep.

Who live and move but have no being.

We pray for children who want to be carried and for those who must be.

For those we never give up on, and for those who never get a second chance.

For those we smother.

And for those who will grab the hand of anybody kind enough to offer.

We pray for our children.

Do we have the capacity to love children in such a way that their childhoods and sometimes their lives don't end in such unnatural ways as abuse, neglect and abandonment can.

America loves its children, whose pictures aren't on anybody's dresser, who aren't spoiled by anybody whose nightmares come in the daytime, who go to bed hungry and cry themselves to sleep.

The 23rd Psalm is the first poem that my mother ever insisted that her children memorize.

I have carried it in my heart my whole life.

Every great faith tradition admonishes us, thou shalt not kill.

But from the time I started working in a Korean orphanage with abused, neglected and abandoned children to this day.

62 years later, I have seen the dreams, the spirit, the hope in so many children, killed, killed with the pointed finger and not the open arms of forgiveness and love.

And I just want those children to know that this psalm, this poem that speaks of peace, no fear, mercy and goodness is a blessing meant especially for them.

The 23rd Psalm.

The Lord is my shepherd.

I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.

He leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul.

He leadeth me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

For thou art with me.

Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.

Thou anointest my head with oil.

My cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.

And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

No matter the love, the forgiveness, the mercy extended, the tide draws away from the shoreline and we are sometimes left struggling to remember Forgetfulness.

The name of the author is the first to go, followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel, which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago, you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye and watched the quadratic equation packets bag.

And even now, as you memorize the order of the planets, something else is slipping away.

A state flower, perhaps the address of an uncle.

the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember, it is not poised on the tip of your tongue or even lurking in some obscure corner of your brain.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L, as far as you can recall.

Well, on your own way to oblivion, where you will join those who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle on a book of war.

No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem.

That you used to know by heart.

In this beautiful journey, we move from one stage of life to another the cradle, youth and emancipation, freedom even to lose ourselves in the wilderness and the desert storms, hopefully finding wisdom before we face the final crossing of the Jordan.

Even if our faith questions to the very end, the great Spanish poet Luis Alberto de Cuenca captures our journey in his moving poem Moses.

Give me your hand.

We have to cross the river.

And my strength fails me.

Hold me as if I were an abandoned package in a wicker basket.

A lump that moves and cries in the twilight.

Cross the river with me.

Even if this time the waters don't part before us.

Even if this time God doesn't come to our aid.

In a flurry of arrows, riddles our back.

Even if there is no river.

I looked over Jordan.

What did I see comin for to carry me home.

So band of angels coming after me.

Comin for to carry me home.

So I leave you to ponder my favorite poem.

Late Fragments By Raymond Carver.

And did you get what you wanted from this life?

Even so.

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved.

To feel myself beloved on the earth.

There are so many even sows in our life.

For me, the failure of my first marriage, a mental health breakdown, losing the race for the job that I really wanted.

So many others.

But in the end, can we call ourselves the beloved and feel that with all of the even souls in our life, we are loved.

We are loved upon this earth.

[MUSIC]