“And what is so rare as a day in June?”

I’ve never forgotten this line of poetry by James Russell Lowell which I memorized in the sixth grade. We all had to learn the poem by heart and recite it in front of the class. Each month we memorized a new poem. This was my introduction to poetry and a vivid part of my education. I can still see the face of Mrs. Tarrant and her dyed red hair.

I just looked up the poem online and am startled to see how long it is. We only learned part of the first verse. I’m also startled to see that the full poem only appears on one website, poetrynook.com, so go there to find it.

Today I sit on my little balcony in Tucson and wonder why we didn’t learn more about the whole poem decades ago. And I wonder why we don’t introduce children to the pain of life sooner. They certainly feel it. Why not gently help them begin to come to terms with pain? Bad things happen to young people. I was about to turn eighteen, and my brother and sister were only eleven and twelve.

Childhood Pain

There was intense suffering in my childhood. But my parents were so numbed by their own pain that they didn’t help us with ours. I still deal with the effects of unaddressed, delayed, and complicated family grief to this day. My youngest brother was born with Down’s Syndrome. I knew he was “different,” but my parents didn’t explain why for several years. When Richie was dying of leukemia and crying in the night, I went into the bedroom where my mother soothed him and asked what was wrong. She merely said, “He has water on the knee. Go back to sleep.” Richie died soon after that on a rare day in June at the age of eight: June 4, 1962.

Six months later to the very day, on September 4, 1962, my brother Marty was killed in a car accident. He was driving and crashed into a stone wall. The three boys with him were barely injured. Marty was a month from his seventeenth birthday. Two weeks later, I left home in Connecticut for my first year of college in Washington D.C. I was in deep trauma and didn’t know it. I didn’t know the meaning of the word. No one in the family received any kind of counseling. Who did in 1962? We all stuffed the pain and carried on. I never saw my mother shed a single tear. She died on her dialysis machine twenty years later. The official cause of death was renal failure, but I think a broken heart was partly to blame. She was only 67, over ten years younger than I am now.

Fourth from the left, I took Richie for a walk every day, here with my friends. My sister Connie is the little tyke next to me.

“Perfect Days”

The first verse of Lowell’s poem sings about the “perfect days” of summer and names the growing things, the nesting birds, and the “lusty crowing” of the “clear bold chanticleer.” I love his line about the buttercup catching the sun “in its chalice.” The second long verse continues in the same spirit of “ripply cheer.” Although the poet mentions how the past may have been barren, he says it doesn’t matter now because the leaves are green and our hearts are full. The third verse is short. Lowell mentions grief but says it goes, “we know not how,” because “everything is happy now.” In the fourth short verse he mentions sorrow, ache, and tears, but we “forget” them because it’s June, “the season’s youth.”

High Tide of the Year

In my own youth, I rejoiced in June and summer, “the high-tide of the year,” with a heart filled to overflowing in the company of Lowell’s cowslips and buttercups, dandelions, robins, and roosters. School was out. We spent hours in the meadows or at the beach. We dug bushels of clams and picked blueberries. Aunts and uncles and cousins came for Sunday barbecues. We played outside every night till it was too dark to “kick the can.” We ran in the rain and raced the lightning. I went to the library and read book after book. I developed a passion for double solitaire with my summer friend, Claudia. But what about the tears? The grief? The sorrow and ache?

Today I rejoice in the memory of sixth grade and memorizing the first verse of Lowell’s poem. But I’m “mad” at Mrs. Tarrant for not even mentioning the other verses and at least exposing us to what they imply about the other side of life, the barren winter side when birds fly away, their singing stops, green leaves turn brown, and not only grass and flowers die. I’m mad at my parents, too, for not telling us the truth, for not even talking about what happened in our family, let alone grieving together with us. Yet I don’t blame them. How could they when they were so traumatized themselves? Did their parents prepare them for the pain of life and its losses? My grandparents were newly immigrated from Poland and struggling to make their way in a new world. And what about their parents’ parents? What is the responsibility of parents towards their children in the face of tragedy?

The Circle Dance

Nothing is so rare as a day in June, in the lush wetness of my New England childhood or in my elder years here in the Arizona desert, where June is the driest month of the year. Across the wall from my apartment, a rooster crows lustily in the morning when I walk early to beat the heat. The mesquite trees dress in deep rich green. And the Sonoran sky is bluer than blue. Joy comes, yes. And sorrow, too. I don’t cling to the grief in my life, but I do not forget it either. Grief is a sacred part of my story, it helps make me who I am, and it connects me to a great big world of suffering.

As I continue to heal this June, every June, and every day for the rest of my life, may this healing radiate out across the globe and somehow mysteriously make someone else’s healing easier. This is part of the contemplative vocation in the “great circle dance of life.” As my old friend Bro. David Steindl-Rast says, “… since everything hangs together with everything, the whole dance is affected by the way each dancer dances. The quality of the sacred circle dance depends on the attention each dancer pays to all others.” Especially on rare days in June.