The Big Events
So, your years are less than forty
and now you have your Big Event to cherish.
Congratulations, proud new owner,
begrudge no more the grizzled rest of us
our Kennedy or King or sinking of the Arizona,
you have A Day of Infamy
to call your own.
It comes as no surprise,
man’s inhumanity to man,
but neither does his love.
Bend closer to the earth.
Draw near to me
my wide-eyed love
beneath this quiet, jetless sky.
The crickets sing, the katydids
file down the ragged edge of day
to night, the birds fly to their roosts
as they have done, and do, and will
–– we are the short-term visitors.
The truly big events make no explosion,
the great events to which all things consent,
they make no stir, no vacuum to be filled,
for they are gradual,
like soaking rain.
Draw near to me
my wide-eyed love.
Lying drenched on the side of some bare hill
we watch the globes descend,
and love the rain again,
your shining face in both my broken hands.
–– J. O'Brien, read at Club Cafe, Pitsburgh, September, 2001.
