Sunday

Nov. 19, 2000

Forty-One, Alone, No Gerbil

by Sharon Olds

Broadcast date: SUNDAY, 19 November 2000

Poem: “Forty-One, Alone, No Gerbil,” by Sharon Olds, from The Wellspring (Alfred A. Knopf).

In the strange quiet, I realize
there’s no one else in the house. No bucktooth
mouth pulls at a stainless-steel teat, no
hairy mammal runs on a treadmill—
Charlie is dead, the last of our children’s half-children.
When our daughter found him lying in the shavings, trans-
mogrified backwards from a living body
into a bolt of rodent bread
she turned her back on early motherhood
and went on single, with nothing. Crackers,
Fluffy, Pretzel, Biscuit, Charlie,
buried on the old farm we bought
where she could know nature. Well, now she knows it
and it sucks. Creatures she loved, mobile and
needy, have gone down stiff and indifferent,
she will not adopt again though she cannot
have children yet, her body like a blueprint
of the understructure for a woman’s body,
so now everything stops for a while,
now I must wait many years
to hear in this house again the faint
powerful call of a young animal.

On this day in 1861, Julia Ward Howe awoke from a deep sleep and wrote 5 verses of a song straight out on a scrap of paper. Sung to the tune of "John Brown's Body,” it soon became the anthem of the North during the Civil War: The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

It was on this day in 1863 that President Abraham Lincoln got up in front of about 15,000 people seated at a new national cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Gettysburg was the pivotal battle of the Civil War, with 45,000 casualties over three days in early July that year. After the battle, a Gettysburg man named David Wills had the terrible task of identifying and burying the dead. Wills wrote Lincoln and asked him to attend the cemetery's dedication ceremony, because, he said, Lincoln's presence would:

"…kindle anew in the breasts of the Comrades of those brave dead a confidence that they who sleep in death on the Battle Field are not forgotten by those highest in Authority.”

It was a foggy, cold morning, and Lincoln arrived about 10 AM. Around noon the sun broke out as the crowds gathered on a hill overlooking the battle field. A military band played, a local preacher offered a long prayer, and orator Edward Everett spoke for over two hours. Around 3 p.m. Lincoln got up to speak. He spoke for only two minutes, and when he sat down most of the people in the back of the crowd didn't know he'd even spoken: Lincoln thought his speech, the Gettysburg Address, was a failure. He ended with:

"From these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

It's the birthday of critic and poet Allen Tate, born in Winchester, Kentucky (1899).

It's the birthday of poet Sharon Olds, born in San Francisco (1942).

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

 

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