a buffet of emotions
I find that my default emotional setting
easily slips into sorrow, tears,
rage against how much the Light
is buffeted by the Dark,
I have earned the relative ease of my retirement,
the many decades I worked to help with
the psychic bleeding I saw within my students
and to help them know that each is a "work in progress,"
that the vision of who each felt themselves to be
was surely of the best the universe was able to allow,
that the tentative, anxious self before me,
was more of love, of wholeness, of the right,
than each could easily hold and release,
now I am past that way to minister to the young,
I did it well
now it is others' charge to continue
to see the child, to know the child,
to allow the child to move forward
into the power of self inherent within them,
now I need to grasp and embody what my "calling" is now,
how I can serve the future
by continuing to give to the world out of love,
while also accepting from the world
the grace I have earned,
the Puritan within me seems to need to get a grip.
by Henry H. Walker
March 3, ‘26
