Postscript: Return to Hayneville
Yes
Burden and blessing—
two blossoms on the same branch.
To be so lost
in this radiant wilderness.
THE BLESSING
PART ONE
1
Blessing
Do I dare to say my brother’s death was a blessing? Who would recoil first from such a statement? A reader, unsure of its context, but instinctively uneasy with the sentiment? Or me, who knows more of the context than I sometimes think I can bear, having spent most of my life struggling with that death because I caused it? Can I keep my own nerve long enough to work my way through the strangeness of that word?
In French, the verb blesser means “to wound.” In English, “to bless” is to confer spiritual power on someone or something by words or gestures. When children are christened or baptized in some Christian churches, the priest or minister blesses them by sprinkling holy water on their faces. But the modern word has darker, stranger roots. It comes from the Old English bletsian, which meant “to sprinkle with blood” and makes me think of ancient, grim forms of religious sacrifice where blood not water was the liquid possessing supernatural power—makes me remember standing as a boy so close to a scene of violence that the blood of it baptized me.
To wound, to confer spiritual power, to sprinkle with blood. There is something about the intersection of these three meanings that penetrates to the heart of certain violent events of my childhood. I feel as if life itself were trying to reveal some mystery to me by making those three sources meet in my own life.
To wound. To cause blood to flow out of a mortal body. To stand so near that I was spattered with the blood of it. And yet I did not die. Why was I spared? Now that I am in my fifties, I am finally brave enough to ask that aloud, although it is a question that has moved like an underground river below my whole life since that day, moved there with the steady, insistent rhythm of a heartbeat, as if the words themselves made the earth pulse through my feet.
Why was I spared? I’m not sure there is any answer to my question. I know I don’t expect the answer to come from anyone else. I don’t even expect it to come from me. Maybe it’s because I’m a poet and I’ve spent my adult life believing words have the power to reveal what is hidden, but I believe the answer to my question emerges from this odd word itself, this “blessing”
