I scrub the long floorboards
 in the kitchen, repeating
 the motions of other women
 who have lived in this house.
 And when I find a long gray hair
 floating in the pail,
 I feel my life added to theirs.

The first thing that struck me about this piece was the title. It held so much more than what was apparent at first look. Memories, emotions, sadness… The touching simplicity of the poem and the matter-of-fact way a daily chore has been discussed and an ensuing thought process followed is amazing. Being a regular trekker I usually encounter quite a few memoirs of the past - sometimes an old dilapidated abandoned fort or a temple of ages ago in the deep forest and some other times rocks that bear the marks of the times they’ve been through. Each pebble has a story to tell and if you are patient enough you eventually manage to get it out of them. Touching those stones, you can easily feel that you are not the only one to have done that. You know that once life had flourished where there’s nothing more than wilderness now. Sometimes it scares you - the fact that you are not alone where you stand at the moment - but nevertheless, connecting to the past has always been a humbling experience for me. Sometimes a piece of old rock can teach you more about life than a dozen philosophers. Sometimes a single gray hair can be the part of a thread of the most remarkable story you’d ever come across.

— Hemant

Biographical Notes

Jane Kenyon (1947-1995) was a well-known contemporary American writer. Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she published four collections of poetry and a translation of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova before her untimely death from leukemia in 1995. She was the recipient of numerous awards for her poetry, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the PEN Voelcker Award. She was featured with her husband, poet Donald Hall, on the Emmy-Award winning Bill Moyers special, “A Life Together.”

[Minstrels link]

Poem #474, Otherwise – Jane Kenyon