Review of Charleen McClure’s poem ‘Caretaker’

 Review of Charleen McClure’s poem ‘Caretaker’

This is a powerful poem on care, love and bitterest truths slapped on us by death. Contextually I would cite a teaching of Buddha here. A woman pleaded Buddha very desperately to bring back life to the corpse of her young son who passed away. She didn’t perform the last rites and was insistent. Buddha didn’t give her any reply but she waited in his hermitage for many hours. Finally Buddha called her, “Please bring a handful of sesame seeds from a house where death never took place.” Her face brightened and she knocked at each door of all the household of the entire village. To her dismay she couldn’t find even one family who hadn’t suffered the loss of death. She returned to Buddha and fell at his feet and left to perform her son’s last rites without a word. Buddha remained composed as ever.

The very fiber of modern poetry or fiction is woven by minute strings of attachments, illusions and desires and despairs. Literature doesn’t even share any border with spirituality, because the pedestal of preaching is never the destination of a creative mission. Creative arena is always too distant from the pursuit of ultimate bliss or ultimate truth. Any creative work pulsates with the pains and pleasures of human life with numerous unanswered questions on the pitfalls and vulnerabilities in every walk of life. The essence of human values is inclusiveness. Hence there is never a question of a wise creative writer or poet sitting on a pedestal and preaching the ignorant masses of readers. The poem centers on the prolonged grief of a widow who carries the loss of her partner to her grave. The narrator, as we infer, is her daughter and now it is her turn to suffer the grief that would be her partner for a very long time and mostly till her death. The poetic expression ‘Like a widow she chews the end of a bone already buried’ is very striking. The reader understands she lost her living partner. The scene of the household visualized in the poem reveals the inmates were lonely and uncared-for. The daughter, the narrator is deeply hurt when her attempt to feed her ailing mother for the last time fails. But in a tiny world both of them were caretakers of one another; while the daughter took physical care of the mother too, the latter was her caretaker by her very existence and belonging. The core of a relationship is the bonding and the belonging and never the utility. This poem’s strength is highlighting this wonderful secret in fewer words.

We certainly mourn the death of great souls of the humanity who contributed to the cause of masses during their lives or were role models in different fields. The pride overshadows the grief in such losses. In contrast, the grief on personal losses lingers for ever if the deceased could never find the meaning of her life and cherish the invaluable moments of being alive. This deep rooted grief, of course, lingers only in the heart that genuinely loved the departed soul. This poem’s success is subtle expression of the complexity of a genuine grief.