A Poem for the Season

This poem speaks to me about the resilience of those who live outside the margins of a caring and compassionate society.

Thanks by W. S. Merwin from his 1988 collection, The Rain in the Trees. Merwin is one of America’s most prolific scribblers, with over 30 books of poetry, translation and prose under his belt. In 2010 the Library of Congress named Merwin the seventeenth United States Poet Laureate.

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

~W. S. Merwin published over twenty books of poetry, including the recent collections The Shadow of Sirius which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize; Present Company (Copper Canyon, 2007); Migration: New & Selected Poems (2005) which won the 2005 National Book Award; The Pupil (2002); The River Sound (1999), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Flower and Hand: Poems 1977-1983 (1997); The Vixen (1996); and Travels (1993), which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He has also published nearly twenty books of translation, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2004) and Dante’s Purgatorio, and numerous plays and books of prose.

Merwin’s honors include the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Bollingen Prize, a Ford Foundation grant, the Governor’s Award for Literature of the State of Hawaii, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He is a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and has served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. In 2010, Merwin was appointed the Library of Congress’s seventeenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.(From www.poets.org)

Free Portraits for Those Who are Less Fortunate

Here is a wonderful idea! Click HERE to read more and see the image.

Photographers in Winnipeg are set to bring smiles to the faces of some of the city's less fortunate residents.

Help Portraits is a global movement that provides free professional portraits.

In the past, Winnipeg photographers associated with Help Portraits operated out of schools.

This year, they are setting up at Siloam Mission, Win Gardner Place and Agape Table.

Photographer Ian McCausland says it's a great way for families to create holiday memories.

"Especially when there's younger people and kids involved, I think there's important value to having the opportunity or occasion to recognize your family," McCausland said.

Now that is an idea rooted in compassion.

A New Year's Reflection for Al Etmanski

Al Etmanski is Canada's godfather of social finance, social enterprise and innovation, especially in the realm of social care. As if he doesn't do enough for our country every day, each year at about this time, Al asks a number of his colleagues to reflect on a question. Last year, we all wrote about a trend or phenomenon we would like to see made more visible in 2011. This year, Al usurped a metaphor from Wayne Gretzky, our national ice hockey hero (who could always predict where the puck would be on the ice) and asked, "This year, what are you skating towards?" Here is my offering. I encourage everyone to subscribe to Al's blog and to read the full complement of responses to Al's question for 2012. They will be available to read early in the New Year.

What are you skating towards? Frankly, I have no idea. I am careening and I can’t quite see where the winds of change are taking me. Within the last four months, we have moved our family across the world, my husband retired from the diplomatic corps after thirty-seven years, and we helped our adult son relocate from the family home into a residence with nursing care. In my book and my blogs, I write about disability, care in the community and our aging population. Lucky that I have such rich material within my own four walls!

During the past few months, I described to a friend how I felt about the onslaught of change in my life - “it’s as if someone has removed all the floorboards from my house”, I said. “It’s like I am walking on just the narrow joists and all the time, I worry about falling”.

I know that others will write here about skating towards positive change, and I will be inspired. But I would like to talk about ‘defense’ and not ‘offense’, to use another hockey metaphor. A great defensive player also knows where the puck will be in order to stop a goal by the opposing team.

Over the last year, I have observed a pernicious trend, and in 2012, I will be skating defensively toward it. Thanks to information technology, I have many friends all over the world who are also parents of children with disabilities. One family, from Australia, I have known ‘virtually’ for many years - their son has developmental disabilities, is medically complex and has managed to survive over 77 hospitalizations in his 23 years of life. This year, the professional advisory committee at their hospital took a unilateral decision that there would be no more ICU hospitalizations or resuscitation measures because these would ‘not be in the best interest of the patient’ and furthermore, they would be ‘futile’. It was my guess that a meeting of hospital administrators had taken place that basically placed a cap on the public funds that one individual could or should consume in a lifetime - especially if that individual had development disabilities. This is a story that I am hearing more and more from families the world over.

In November of this year, Louise Kinross, the editor of "BLOOM”, the Holland Bloorview family magazine, attended a conference on medical ethics and disability at McGill. She reported that one neonatologist commented “There is a feeling among my colleagues – an unspoken and probably unconscious bias – between physical and mental disability. Sometimes neonatologists think if you're not perfect mentally, you're better off dead. But when it comes to physical disability, they will go a long way with interventions.” But also described at the McGill seminar was “The Disability Paradox” - that people with serious disabilities rate their lives as good or excellent while able-bodied people, particularly medical professionals, rate quality of life in people with disabilities as poor.

The elderly, especially those with dementia, are also in a risky situation. In the absence of a strong and vocal personal support network, those who are vulnerable and voiceless risk becoming expendable, especially in a climate of austerity. And I believe that negative attitudes toward those who are not employed or employable are growing.

The worth of giving and receiving care is my ‘defensive’ strategy. I believe that in Canada, we urgently need a public conversation about a national ethic of care. We need to pick apart the human value of those individuals with care needs and who will pay for their wellbeing. The moral, political and financial responsibilities of care must be delineated for the individual, the family and all levels of government. We must nurture and enable innovation and sustainable business models to operate in this sphere and we must do it now.

My hair is white and my son requires 24 hour nursing care. My mother turns 90 this year. Scratch the surface of Canadian society - my family is not that unusual. Careening toward the future is not a good way to score goals and win the game OR make public policy. We need an honest and public appraisal of our strengths and capabilities in the arena.

In my family, we rate our life as excellent. I want to make sure that we keep it that way, so in 2012 I'll be keeping my eye on the puck and designing my next defensive strategy.