A Writer’s Prayer

Photo by Heather Clark

Maybe we can’t plot the moment when we were changed irrevocably; when we ricocheted off of greatness along a new course that would become our trajectory; when we saw, for a moment, what we wanted to reach for before we died.

Or maybe, if we look closely enough, we can.

I read a lot growing up. I don’t know a writer who didn’t. And, given my context, I read a broad swath of material. Hemingway when I was eight. Stephen King when I was nine. Catton and Hughes when I was ten. Austen when I was eleven. Didion when I was twelve. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Shakespeare by the time I was fourteen. Alice Walker almost got me kicked out of high school when I was a freshman.  

Somehow, though, I missed Walt Whitman until I was a senior. Or, more precisely, until I was almost done being a senior.

Uncle Walt was like one of those bands you knew that you needed to “know” but you didn’t know how to “know” so you just pretended you knew what people who actually “knew” them talked to you.

Random Dude in High School: “You like Bad Brains, right? I mean, those guys were like pioneers.” 

Me: “Totally. I mean, I’m kinda partial to Black Flag because, like, Henry Rollins is a poet or something, but…”

Random Dude: “Totally.”

So it was with Whitman, until that sappy moment when, at the end of the senior slide show at the end of prom, when the Walt truck hit me. Let me set the unlikely stage. Kids in tuxes and formal gowns. On a paddle boat. Almost to the after party. Video slide show with Whitney Houston as a soundtrack. And then – cue the synth orchestra – the words of “Oh Me! Oh Life!” roll up the screen.

And there I was, through the swirl and clatter of gossip and teenage nostalgia and plates being cleared, transfixed by a poem I should have already known.

Oh Me! Oh Life!
Walt Whitman

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
                                       

                                                        Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
Source: Leaves of Grass (1892)

This. This was my moment. I always loved to read. But this, this simple profundity, this small moment of stable clarity in a world that felt like it just wouldn’t stop shifting under my feet. This was it.

I’m fairly certain this is the beginning of my journey as a writer, not that I knew it at the time. There were other influential points on the plot line, but this was my genesis moment. My garden and my fall and my intention to journey toward making sense of it all for someone else.

Twenty years later, I’m still working. Still grinding. Still trying to be even a cut-rate Walt. But I’m still certain of these things:

I am here.

The actors are still on the stage.

And my verse may still yet get read.

What was your moment? Who authored it? Let me know.