PerfectlyWritePoetry: ‘That Cottage of Darkness’

Thursday 5 June 2014

‘That Cottage of Darkness’

Mystical or practical, there are as many theories as there are scholars explaining why Jews stay up all night to study Torah on Shavuot.

This is the harvest festival that occurred this week and which also celebrates the giving of the Torah – the Jewish Written Law – on Mount Sinai.

There is no restriction on what is studied or how it is examined. So at Kehilat Hakerem Congregation in Karmiel, where there were two English language sessions, the first somehow dovetailed an in-depth analysis of a passage from Talmud with a piece by non-Jewish American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Mary Oliver.

Both the Talmud extract (Berachot 5b) and the poem, When Death Comes examine illness and impending death and different approaches to it. While the ancient sages concluded that “the prisoner cannot free himself from jail”, Oliver insists on looking at the next world as ‘another possibility,/ …. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world”.

Here is a link to a close examination of Oliver’s poem while I close this post by publishing it in full:

“When Death Comes

“When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

“to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

“when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

“I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

“And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

“and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

“and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

“and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

“When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

“I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world”.