A Tale Begun

Friends, we are expecting a baby boy this spring! Hubby and I are overjoyed, and our lives now seem to be filled with preparations for our new arrival. (I will be posting more about it as we get closer.) This time in our lives is reminded me of a poem I heard once read during an NPR interview, about 4 or 5 years ago. The interview was with Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1996. I was reminded of her work again today when it was announced that she'd passed away. Though the segment discussed many of Szymborska's poems, they ended the segment with a reading of a poem she published in 1993, in a collection entitled,"View With a Grain of Sand". The poem is "A Tale Begun", and it opens:

The world is never ready
for the birth of a child.

That's certainly how life feels right now to me! Every movement, every molecule of energy is directed by the anticipation of our son's coming, in getting our world ready for him. It is a busy time, with lots of joy and happiness, but also worries and weaknesses that accompany such a life change. It is a time of renewed gratitude and awareness of God's faithfulness as we endure these new challenges and prepare for all of the ones that lie ahead. The last two stanzas of the poem end in a sort of prayer for the coming child, and these are the words that have stuck with me for the past several years:

May delivery be easy,
may our child grow and be well.
Let him be happy from time to time
and leap over abysses.
Let his heart have strength to endure
and his mind be awake a reach far.


But not so far
that it sees into the future.
Spare him 
that one gift,
O heavenly powers.

-Wislawa Szymborska
(Polish Nobel laureate in Poetry, who passed away at age 88, yesterday)

I could sit here and dissect what it is I love about the specific, measured wording of these wishes-- for health, first and foremost; for happiness (but not continual, monotonous happiness); for the ability to overcome and endure things. But I most love the mental image of a mind that is awake and can reach far. Such a powerful gift that would be!

And yet, at the end, she cannot help but temper even that wish with a request for a protective limit.
It says so much about the heart of a parent, to me. And also, of our temptation to want to snatch control away from an all-powerful, all-loving God.
Beautiful, evocative stuff.

~Heather