Sacred heart #34

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved
to feel myself
beloved on the earth

Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. (1938 – 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. In their 1989 nomination of Carver for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the jury concluded, “The revival in recent years of the short story is attributable in great measure to Carver’s mastery of the form.”

Carver died at just 50 years of age after a chaotic life that included alcoholism. This poem, “Late Fragment,” is engraved on his tombstone.

“Did you get what you wanted?” that is a question we may all ask ourselves at the end of life. Was it worth it? Did it matter? To be loved – isn’t that what we all want, what we all search for, what we call hide under our addictions and neuroses and graspings?

To be beloved is, perhaps, not the journey but the destination of this sojourn; to be welcome back into the arms of spirit as Wordsworth might say –

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And Cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home….