“Passive suffering makes the world go round.”
—Seamus Heaney
We passively suffer those things we can’t
do anything to change, which grow more
numerous as we age. We are not
what we were, nor our peers, around us
the losses mount. We suffer the surgery,
hope to go on more or less as before,
though after a point almost always “less.”
Agreeing to live with change, we refrain
from throwing a stick into the spokes of
the wheel — the world keeps spinning, the “meat wheel”
Kerouac called it, wheeling us in,
wheeling us out. And so the great discipline,
knowing when to spike up out of passivity
to blow a flat in the world’s tire, call
the whole thing to a halt long enough
to yawp our refusal, our protest,
and when to endure patiently, calmly the moment
the young nurse searches the vein with her needle.
And when is the pain so disproportionate
there is no more bearing it, only standing
up even though we freeze the sun in the sky.
.
Thomas R. Smith
.