The Moment
The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,
is the same moment the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.
by
Margaret Atwood
in the heart's time by
Janet Morley
This poem is the one for tomorrow (Thursday), Week #3 of Lent in the heart's time. We are using it in our Scripture class just for the season, and I love the way it dovetails with the poem I put up last week called Homesickness. As I reflected on this poem along with Homesickness, I saw it as echoing the tendencies and deep needs associated with homesickness. Thus, the claim, "I own this" represented a symptom, and perhaps even a kind of ratification of what we know as "original sin," that is, the enmeshment in a world that tends toward human beings wanting to be as God.
I could also hear echoes of Augustine's, "Our Hearts are restless until they rest in thee," as the poem spoke to what happens whenever we forget that we are always recipients, and everything coming to us daily is a gift of God which deserves gratitude and awe. At the same time, it speaks to our rejected role (vocation?) as stewards of God's good creation, and the way we have become alienated from it all as we exchange stewardship for ownership and reject the creator God in the process.
There is real tragedy in this poem, all captured in a single moment.
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