A Hermit's Elegy
A Hermit's Elegy
Jesse Keith Butler
We heard there was a hermit. What we heard
was mixed and muddied, muttered in the hall.
The monks were kind enough, but secrets stirred
in empty rooms. It made me think a person
might want a life of silence after all.
We heard there was a hermit. Once we had,
our boredom drove us out to go and see.
The monastery guesthouse wasn’t bad.
But we were young and hadn’t quite stopped searching
for something bigger that our lives could be.
Our path to find the hermit thinly wound
through forests and around a golden field.
Then, just before a clump of hills, we found
a house of corrugated plastic sheeting.
We wondered at what wisdom it concealed.
The man we found was stooped and frail. His beard
was grey and, in his army surplus hat,
he looked a bit like Castro. What was weird
to me though was the joy with which he welcomed
us in and gave us mismatched chairs. We sat.
We started asking questions then. We hoped
for rich and ringing words that would restore
our grounding in the world, for words that scoped
the secrets of the soul. But he said little.
His eyes and voice trailed off toward the door.
He gave us each a chipped enamel cup
of water, while our words hung in the air.
When we ran out of questions, he lit up.
He asked us: “Would you like to meet my donkeys?”
I swear that old man jumped out of his chair.
He ran outside and called them each by name:
“Hosanna! Hallelujah!” Through a cleft
between two hills the bounding donkeys came.
He told us all about the care of donkeys.
We listened for a while and then we left.
We left in disappointment. Our complaint
was vague though. He was kind to us, but we
just weren’t convinced that we had met a saint.
We stumbled through that landscape like two tourists,
discounting anything we couldn’t see.
What was he doing, while he lived so long
in solitude? Just watching donkeys graze?
Perhaps that’s it. But maybe I was wrong
to think that holiness is heard in thunder.
Perhaps it shows in unexpected ways.
Perhaps he’d slowly chipped away to find
a space for joy. Perhaps he tried to share
it with us too. Perhaps my grinding mind
just couldn’t grow to grasp the gift he offered—
the life he’s lifting up in laughter there.
Jesse Keith Butler
Poet & Public Servant
Jesse has been published in The Orchards Poetry Journal and Cloud Lake Literary
Photography by Lynda Logga