Joy Sullivan – Sister

Warning of the dangers of keeping our pain only private, in the early seventeenth century, William Shakespeare wrote in his play, Macbeth, “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.” Considering too the religious practice of confession along with today’s popularity of psychotherapy, and it is evident that we humans need and find medicinal value in sharing with those we trust the raw truth of our suffering and struggles. 

In Joy Sullivan’s Sister, we hear echoes of Naomi Shihab Nye’s insight that we learn the precious value of kindness only by first receiving it from another when we are in a state of brokenness. Through her poem, Sullivan invites readers to feel into a lived sense of the healing balm of being held in the embrace of another’s deep, loving attending.  It recalls German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s note: “True listening is worship.”

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Sister

Let me come and weep beside you. Here
now, give me your knots. Let me take
your bitter bite & honey it. Let me
say oh as you unravel your ache.
Let me walk beside you in the heavy dark.
Let me put my lantern out as well
so we can sit together in the blessed black.
We will be so still. Let me take your child
in my arms, & let me lift her up also.

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