Time Does Not Bring Relief

As the week swings to a close a work, I've been battling a migraine all along. I'm now entering into day 6... and a colleague and I were discussing poetry yesterday at work. We were also discussing how we are dealing with cut-backs, the upcoming Basic Skills Test, her retirement, student teaching, and a variety of changes that we've seen. One of the things we did experience together was the death of my brother and the suicide of her son within the same year. Her student teacher's mother is dying of terminal cancer. Death, it seems, while universal, and unifying, brings me to my knees. My colleague has better perspective.

In our department, we've used the PoetryOutLoud.org website. She shared with me this poem, by Edna St.Vincent Millay today. It takes my breath away, as so much poetry does, because it encapsulates exactly the way I feel about Dave's death. In so many ways, because I know I am never, ever going to get over it. Dave is my first child, the child I try to teach, save, reach every time I come to work. The child I want to say no to drugs. The young kid in the obituaries every time I open them up. He's always going to be twenty-four for me. Frozen, there in time. To find that someone else had this same experience, this same feeling, this same knot in their core was actually liberating for me. That she had written it so well was beautiful, too. Four years.

TIME DOES NOT BRING RELIEF: YOU ALL HAVE LIED

POEM VIEWS: 11506



Born in Rockland, Maine, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) as a teenager entered a national poetry contest sponsored by The
. . . MORE »

BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied

Who told me time would ease me of my pain!

I miss him in the weeping of the rain;

I want him at the shrinking of the tide;

The old snows melt from every mountain-side,

And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;

But last year’s bitter loving must remain

Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.

There are a hundred places where I fear

To go,—so with his memory they brim.

And entering with relief some quiet place

Where never fell his foot or shone his face

I say, “There is no memory of him here!”

And so stand stricken, so remembering him.