The Cruellest Month

It is of course a cliché to resurrect in April the often quoted line from Part I of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, "APRIL is the cruellest month," but I swear April really is the cruellest month. For me a beautiful sight like the peaceful May River yesterday, with signs of new life everywhere, and the suggestion that God is indeed in His heaven, contrasted with disturbing personal memories of other Aprils, where death was very present, is sometimes too much to contain. And then there is Waco. And Oklahoma City. And now there is Montcoal WV.

I have been looking forward to my first Spring road trip this year and the "almost heaven" feeling of driving through the Appalachians in April, but next week as I pass through the area south of Charleston WV, I will be thinking more about what is inside those mountains than the life that is emerging on the hillsides. I can hardly stop thinking of the horror in the hidden mines now. The Scotch-Irish faces of the miners and mourners remind me of my own origins and clan. I remember that I am the daughter of a working man, a proud and dignified man, but a man who carried a lunchbox, a man who understood how his union empowered him. I wonder what I am doing behind gates on a resort island that does not really celebrate workers. I do not feel peacefully at home. Ah, cruelty. I relate to Eliot's despair.

Part V of The Waste Land is titled "WHAT THE THUNDER SAID" and it alludes to mountains and death, although more cryptographic types than I am might dismiss that simple statement in favor of Eliot's more complicated messages. For me, today, it's about mountains and death in the cruellest month.

AFTER the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and place and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

Shantih. Shantih. Shantih.