The Sunday Poem

Let us give thanks

It’s Thanksgiving week. And this year especially, I am filled with gratitude.

When we count our blessings, we come closer to the reality of our lives than when we worry or rage about what we don’t have. This is a perspective, a mental discipline, and a medicine. There’s been a great deal of research over the past couple of decades showing how healthful the practice of gratitude is.

“Studies have consistently found that people who practice gratitude report fewer symptoms of illness, including depression, more optimism and happiness, stronger relationships, more generous behavior, and many other benefits,” according to Expanding the Science and Practice of Gratitude, a multiyear project funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

It’s always nice when modern, data-driven science and social science confirm the wisdom of the ancients and, for those of us so inclined, the word of God.

The beauty of Psalm 107 is another path to the truth that the neuroscientists are discovering.

“O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good:
for his mercy endureth for ever…

Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness,
and for his wonderful works to the children of men!
For he satisfieth the longing soul,
and filleth the hungry soul with goodness.”

It’s been an eventful year for me, a hard year in many ways. But I can honestly say that, amid the stress and setbacks, I am a truly happy man. New possibilities have opened in my life, like the first sunrise you see waking up in a land where you’ve never been before, after arriving in darkness. The place is new to you, and you realize as the light lifts slowly into full morning, that you’re about to become new, too, in some very profound ways. And you smile at that.

So let us all be thankful this week, even—perhaps especially—for the hard times we may have seen this year. Hard times teach us what counts in life. And what doesn’t.

This Thanksgiving, I am grateful above all, of course, for Johanna. My beloved, and hands-down the most interesting person I’ve ever met. Over the past couple of weeks, you may have met Johanna through our first “Ask Me Anything” Substack Live posts, here and here. I hope over the coming year she does more; working with her has been one of those unexpected blessings of becoming an independent journalist.

And I am grateful for my children: Madeleine, my darling, and her wonderful husband, Elliot; and Helen, Michael, and Mary Lou, our not-so-little-ones here at home with Johanna and me. There’s a line from the TV show Downton Abbey, when Dame Maggie Smith, playing the delightfully waspish grande dame Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, declares her opinion of the experience of parenthood: “One forgets about parenthood. The on-and-on-ness of it.” It’s funny (especially in Smith’s wicked, pitch-perfect delivery), but I have to confess—I love the “on-and-on-ness” of being a dad.

My large extended family, and friends and colleagues old and new, also fill my heart as I count my blessings this week.

And, my new friends here on Substack, I am also grateful to you. Suddenly, the work of journalism is very different for me, and that’s because of you. You all don’t seem to me some vague, unreachable audience on the other side of the Jardiance commercials. You’re a community right here that I happen to have crystallized, and you are participating every day in discovering and recounting the news and what it means for our country. I love that—the pushback, the questions, the reports from your own lives and neighborhoods, the perspectives, the wisdom, the decency. This is the next model of journalism in America, and I am so grateful to you that I can be part of it.

It took me a while to figure that out, this cooperative and communitarian model of journalism. And I pledge this to you: I will work to deepen and strengthen this community, make what we do here stronger by making it more interactive, by finding more ways to feature our work together.

There is so much else, of course, that I am grateful for. But let’s get to our poems this week. Yes, plural. Because there is a question hidden in the very word “Thanksgiving.” To whom are we giving thanks? One poem leaves the question unanswered, or answered by every reader in his or her own way. The other is a traditional and joyful poetic prayer of gratitude to God.

James Wright comes first. He was a great American poet of the 20th Century whose direct yet deeply crafted language has often moved me. Poets are like bands; some people are Beatles fans, others like The Rolling Stones. I’m a James Wright guy. This famous poem always struck me as his own quiet, surreal hymn of thanksgiving.

Then, Gerard Manley Hopkins, an English poet of the late 19th Century, who converted to Catholicism and became a Jesuit priest. I wrote my senior thesis in college on Hopkins and the influence on his work of the 13th Century scholastic theologian John Duns Scotus. I don’t remember a thing about Duns Scotus (whose work was so impenetrably complex that we have the word “dunce” from his name), but the poem remains a favorite. My dad used to recite this poem; I hear his voice whenever I read it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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A Blessing

by James Wright

.

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,

Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.

And the eyes of those two Indian ponies

Darken with kindness.

They have come gladly out of the willows

To welcome my friend and me.

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture

Where they have been grazing all day, alone.

They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness

That we have come.

They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.

There is no loneliness like theirs.

At home once more,

They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.

I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,

For she has walked over to me

And nuzzled my left hand.

She is black and white,

Her mane falls wild on her forehead,

And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear

That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

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Pied Beauty

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things –
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                Praise him.