Blessing (For One Who Blessed)
May your palms be as good for blessing now as when you lived and breathed, may your voice still carry us as you used to carry us when you filled a room with laughter and we rode the tide of your arriving shout. May there be a way to bless from the place you inhabit, may you extend your hands and your old way of speaking from the horizon where you live, and may you remember us and bless us here, in this place, and in this time in the lit room of our present imaginations or in the reflected glass, lifted to you or to one another, remembering you; and wondering if you still remember us. And as you have travelled the way before us, may you bless us especially on the long road that starts from these words, in our meetings and in our partings, in our simple wish to find a way and especially, in our visible and invisible arrivals. And because we have still to cross the threshold that you have passed and make the journey that you have completed, and because we do not know from where you bless or even if you still can bless, we need those words of yours and that voice of yours, and the merciful world behind that voice, and your laughter and your hands turned toward us, as strong and as good as they ever were. - from The Seven Streams: An Irish Cycle, originally published in Pilgrim
Beautiful. I gather this is a poem inspired by
John O'Donohue.
I have heard you speak often, over the years, of John O'Donohue's remarkable Irish gift of blessing with his remarkably life-giving hands.
This poem was a reminder of the resource we all have in the long line of people who came before us, and stand just beyond us still, blessing and sustaining us in difficult times.