Most relationships are a complicated mix of love and anger, respect and jealousy, joy and grief. In order to define what joy is, you need to know grief. To feel love, you have to have some acquaintance with anger or hatred. That's how the universe works--it's defined by oppositions.
I'm not being profound here. Many people a lot smarter and more eloquent than me have made the same observation. You can't have light without darkness. Sunrise without sunset. Cold without warm. Music without silence. That's how it all works.
Sharon Olds addresses her father . . .
The Departure
by: Sharon Olds
(to my father)
Did you weep like the Shah when you left? Did you forget
the way you had had me tied to a chair, as
he forgot the ones strapped to the grille
in his name? You knew us no more than he knew them,
his lowest subjects, his servants, and we were
silent before you like that, bowing
backwards, not speaking, not eating unless we were
told to eat, the glass jammed to our
teeth and tilted like a brass funnel in the
soundproof cells of Teheran. Did you forget
the blood, blinding lights, pounding on the door, as
he forgot the wire, the goad,
the stone tables? Did you weep as you left
as Reza Pahlevi wept when he rose
over the gold plain of Iran, did you
suddenly want to hear our voices, did you
start to rethink the darkness of our hair,
did you wonder if perhaps we had deserved to live,
did you love us, then?
Sharon Olds' relationship with her father was obviously fraught, as evidenced by this poem. There was physical and emotional abuse layered on top of alcoholism. Yet, after her father died, she wrote a collection of poems titled The Father that was all about her love and acceptance of him, recognizing the cycle of drinking and violence that formed him as a person.
I love my wife, but we have struggled a great deal in our time together. I love my son and daughter, but I haven't always agreed with the life choices they've made. My dad and I had a complex bond, filled with both love and confusion--me not getting him sometimes, and vice versa. I love my close friends, but that doesn't mean we see eye-to-eye on every subject. Far from it.
Yet, if the basis of a relationship is mutual respect and affection, that relationship will thrive. I will do anything for my family and loved ones. They know that. I don't hold grudges. Life is too short, and, in the end, all the anger and resentment only harms myself. If the biggest mistake I ever make in my life is loving someone who harms me in some way, I'd count that as a win.
Saint Marty wrote a poem about joy and grief tonight, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:
Write a poem about twins where the first and last lines are the same line. Have the poem be about two of something or two similar events. As you continue to write, consider objects that come in pairs or images that have something to do with twins (Doublemint gum, pairs of socks, hot and cold faucet handles, etc.) Write your poem in couplets or have stanzas mirror each other, such as two stanzas of three lines, then two stanzas of five lines. Feel free to title the poem "Twins" even if your poem isn't directly about two people.
Twins
by: Martin Achatz
for Mary Oliver
You wrote we shake with joy and grief,
both inside us like lungs doing
their sustaining work. Perhaps they do
eat at the same dinner table, one
liking biscuits and gravy, the other
preferring ham and eggs. And maybe
they even go for walks, morning, evening,
holding hands, high school sweethearts,
bodies so perfectly suited to each other
they nest in bed at night
like just-washed spoons in a drawer,
still smelling of lemony soap.
I bet they lived next to you, Mary,
neighbors who came over for wine
on New Year's Eve, when everyone
is Janus, gazing backward and forward,
and, at midnight, raised glasses, toasted
all that was, all that is to come.
As they left, trooping through snow
toward home, you watched them from
a window, marveled how you
couldn't tell them apart in the bright
moonlight, then took out your notebook where
you wrote about shaking with joy and grief.
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