I love this phrase. I came across it last week flicking through an anthology of British and American Poetry and it made me think:
The Ball Poem
By John Berryman
What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,
What, what is he to do? I saw it go
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
Merrily overâ€â€there it is in the water!
No use to say ‘O there are other balls’:
An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy
As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down
All his young days into the harbour where
His ball went. I would not intrude on him,
A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now
He senses first responsibility
In a world of possessions. People will take balls,
Balls will be lost always, little boy,
And no one buys a ball back. Money is external.
He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,
The epistemology of loss, how to stand up
Knowing what every man must one day know
And most know many days, how to stand up
And gradually light returns to the street
A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight,
Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
Floor of the harbour . . .I am everywhere,
I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move
With all that move me, under the water
Or whistling, I am not a little boy.
In this week when I’ve led services for Remembrance, (hence the poppies above), I’ve been struck by how we each understand loss. From a boy losing a ball, through to the loss of thousands upon thousands of lives in Flander’s fields we come to a personal knowledge of loss only by experiencing it, although even when we experience it we may not fully understand it. I found leading a service commemorating deaths in combat, not least those 60-80 years ago, a difficult task. I’ve never been to war, I’ve never held a gun and I’ve never known the loss of freedom or its threat. But something in my own ‘epistemology of loss’ (knowledge of what loss is/means/etc) tells me that it is important to try to understand. In Berryman’s poem the boy engages with loss at his level, and it is tough for him “to stand up�. But we are enriched by knowing he has wrestled with the loss and moved forward. For the war veterans, the survivors and those like them, is the hardest thing when it seems impossible to move forward but still having to live with the acute hollow absence? A little knowledge like theirs may be a dangerous and dreadful (but very valuable) thing.
See:
Look here for more on the poem
