Pool by the Sheep Gate
He’d been
lying there most of his life.
When the
angel troubled the water, he couldn’t move
fast enough
to be first. He had no wife
or brother
to carry him: no one that love,
a sense of
justice, or pity moved to the task.
So when the
wonderworker came, he was resigned
again to
seeing someone else cured. He didn’t ask,
even when
the healer looked him in the eye
and
inquired if he wished to be healed–
not a
strange question, considering his vocation
of living
in hope denied: he was a professional
at it, with
status and a certain reputation.
Take up your bed…. He obeyed before he thought,
luckily, of
all he’d have to learn to live without.
This poem
is based on a passage from the gospel of John, in which Jesus heals a lame man
who has never been able to reach the healing pool by the sheep gate, precisely
because he is crippled. It offers an
interesting perspective: it suggests, yes, the power of Christ as seen by a
committed Christian; but it also makes a reader ponder the fact that human
beings can get attached to their own misfortunes, that a depressed state of
mind can, for some, become a luxury– which the man healed here will have to do
without.
The poem
seems excellent to me. It was written by my friend of over forty years, Robert
Siegel. Cancer claimed Bob’s life a few months back, and I will miss him, as
poetry will. Bob had faced his disease with valor and with faith.
Thinking on
his passing led me also to think, scarcely for the first time, about poetic
reputation, about which I have never much been concerned. But renown was even
less crucial to Bob Siegel, in part because of the faith I just mentioned.
Worldly fame had to be relatively inconsequential to him.
Bob had a
distinguished career: I knew him first at Dartmouth, from which, as poets, we
were both axed, creative work not passing for real publication back in those
days. (It’s a very different matter there now, thanks in no small part to the
efforts of my friend, the wonderful poet Cleopatra Mathis.) He went on to teach
at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee, where he established its MFA program.
He published nine books of poems, gathered numerous awards and fellowships, and
enjoyed real esteem as a teacher.
But Bob was
under-recognized as a poet (though the phrase, of course, sounds redundant:
after all, an immensely successful book of poems will sell fewer copies than,
say, a mediocre pro baseball team will sell tickets to a given game). I suspect
that his relatively small reputation had to do with his lifelong, deeply
committed Christianity.
The
consensual view of Ivy League liberals (among which –full disclosure– I must be
numbered): the consensual view of such folk, whose influence on too much of our
public dialogue strikes me as disproportionate, dismisses the religious
perspective, often rancorously,
sometimes insultingly. My own Christianity is far more heterodox than Bob’s
ever was, yet I have frequently had to bite my lip among northeastern
“progressives” while they lampoon my beliefs.
It turns
out that for the self-styled enlightened ones, religionists are the only
remaining group in western culture toward whom it seems not merely okay but also
commendable to practice intolerance. Men and women who wouldn’t dream of slurring an ethnic community or
those with an alternate sexual identity– indeed, people who, like me, would
lambaste anyone who did so as a bigot– feel free to see all people of faith as
one and the same… and as fair game for mockery or debasement.
In short,
it appears that we needn’t reject blanket judgment on any given group of
people; rather, we must be sure that we make that judgment on the right group of people. If we honor that
principle, you see, we are not narrow-minded. We can say whatever we want about
these undesirables.
We must
despise orthodoxies…unless they are our own.
But don’t
our own orthodoxies, as much as anyone else’s, close us off, say, from a poem
as deft and challenging as “Pool by the Sheep Gate”?