Desert places

Her first few days back at work after our fifteenth date, while I was still at the office in Faraway City, D was having a tough time of things. Work was hard, she wanted to be with me instead of where she lives and works (hundreds of miles from Faraway City, and thousands of miles from where I live most of the time), the weather was crappy ... and in general life just sucked. So one day, right at the end of the week as I was about to fly home, she wrote me this:

I wish you were here, but I'm irritable and restless. I just want to sleep and avoid all my work because I feel less and less competent as the weeks roll by. This is an insanely difficult job and it's not about to get any easier.... [She described some of the crazy things going on at her school.] Right now, all I have is poetry, and this fiercely negative poem powerfully touches exactly where I am right now.

Desert Places, by Robert Frost

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it - it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less -
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
WIth no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places

I had never heard the poem before, although it's very compelling. But what to say in return? I thought about this in the airport and on the plane; and when I finally got home I wrote her back as follows:

The Robert Frost poem -- I had never seen it before, but I love it. You are right: it is "fiercely negative" and very powerful. Reading it, I just want to take you in my arms and hold you for a while. And yet, I couldn't help thinking, as I pondered it, that I often have a very different take on solitude. No surprise, because you are in such a bad place in so many ways besides the geographical. But I spent a little time the last couple of hours trying to figure out how to express this other view. I am embarrassed to put my words next to Robert Frost's, because the comparison does nothing except to highlight the yawning gap between true poetry and the cheap verse I crank out. Still, I wrote it for you to read, and not just for me to bury in oblivion, so here goes.

I start in exactly the same winter forest where Frost does ....

The field lies silent underneath the snow.
The empty forest round about it stands.
The woodland creatures sleep in holes below.
The solitude is fierce in desert lands.

The air is cold and still. No breath is heard,
But bleak and dead and lonely fades the day.
When, almost out of view, a little bird
Hops lightly on the snow and flies away.

So, long ago, in desert Palestine,
A bird flew down o'er River Jordan's flood,
To cry that in the desert waste the Vine
Of love still grew, and that this love is God.

In desert solitude our God is known.
Where there is love, we never are alone.