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THE BOOK OF JOHN
By Lindsey
Royce
A SAINT JULIAN PRESS BOOK REVIEW
Written by Publisher/CEO/Executive
Editor – Ron Starbuck
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If memory defines us by some measure and means, by a greater mystery, Lindsey Royce has written an exquisite remembrance in verse. In a voice of sadness and grief. She challenges the injustice of losing her husband, John, to cancer.
Like Jacob at Peniel, she wrestles with the angels and with God. In a selfless innermost and intimately revealing conversation, she challenges the mercy of a God who allows such suffering. Searching for another path — she cannot help herself, and few of us will when facing such grief.
Listen to these lines from — The Book of John.
My husband could be anyone
In this half-light. I pay gentle attention
To massaging his toes, the balls of his feet,
And his arches, the only body
Parts the cancer hasn’t slit
Like the gut of a fish 1
~
“Dear Mom, What I am starving for can't be sated. It is the season of bone.
Loss sprawls across the bed of memory I crept under to hide from the
screaming and smashing glass. It's strange how my John's death knifes
open that hole I carry, a cavern so wildly lonely a murmuration
of starlings could swing through...” 2
Her words echo and ring in our minds, psyches, and souls. They grab us with grief; they turn us around and around and around until our vision sees what the poet sees. Until the poet’s words become engraved upon our memory of life.
When he sleeps, I hover, study
His breathing
Once, he would lie on his back, fling
an arm unthinking overhead.
Now he can’t. Sipping air.
afraid to inhale deep, he is fearful
as the stray, starving dog I rescued.
My Marine
has going feather light, sits to dress and pee.
…
In secret to me, he admits,
I guess I’m dying,
And our eyes lock. I can’t look away,
offer hope,
or disagree. 3
Verses engraved upon our memory. Until time stops and time past becomes time present when time future carries our memory across a threshold of remembrance, where transformation rests. A place where we rest in being human—alive, in being itself—resting in our existence.
In the book’s final poem written to John. The poet presents a prayer, a hope, an observation, where what is being observed becomes real and enters her being.
Let me feel your sun warm my throat,
illuminating me from inside. 4
Lindsey goes on from there in verses traced out carefully with a poet's craft to challenge herself and the reader to see beyond the grief, to imagine something more beyond this moment. Life calls out to life; our living goes on despite our suffering because of grief.
It is grief that heals us. Grief is an extension of how much we have loved. In knowing and remembering that love, we are transformed. We are renewed and made whole again through memory. And our memory and memories define us in new and wonderful ways. At a point and in a place...
Where nothing is diminished, nothing ever lost, nothing is left unwritten. At this moment, we move beyond desire, beyond all memory, beyond the light traveling from one still point to another. Resting in its being...
Ron Starbuck
Publisher/CEO/Executive Editor
Saint Julian Press, Inc. © 2023
- “PORTRAIT IN HALF-LIGHT” (Page 3)
- “A SURVEY IN LONELINESS (Page 64)
- “HAWK-LIKE, I CIRCLE” (Page 8)
- “GOD IS THE FISH IN MY MOUTH” (Page 66)
SAINT JULIAN PRESS, INC. © 2022
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