December 3, 2014
Wednesday

. . .
another child
to be wrapped safe and warmed
. . .
passing belief, the fragile wrists, the fingers,
. . .
Hannah’s small hands make all things new.
—Clara Claiborne Park, 1923-2010
American poet, autism advocate, and teacher
from “Advent (H.S.F., newborn December 3, 1980)”

In 2007, I organized all of my poetry volumes, arranged them alphabetically on three shelves, and photographed the result. In 2013 I endeavored to read all of the marked selections in the stack of Poetry magazines that had accumulated. This morning, following up on the resolve expressed yesterday to resume reading a poem a day, I decided to read something in each volume at least once in the coming year. To that end, I pulled down A Year in Poetry: A Treasury of Classic and Modern Verses for Every Date on the Calendar, edited by Thomas Foster and Elizabeth Guthrie. I opened to today’s date.

Each poem in this anthology either mentions a date or is tied to something that occurred on a particular date. Sometimes the editors provide information about the battle or the coronation or other event that prompted the poem. In other cases, such as in Clara Claiborne Park’s “Advent,” you have to do some inferring.

Obviously, the poem commemorates the birth of H.S.F, “newborn” on this day, so it’s not clear if this is the actual day of the birth or if it has been a very recent event. The speaker in the poem has examined the infant’s small hands and has had the opportunity to recollect the emotion of that experience in tranquility, and it’s likely it took a year or more for the poem to come to its final form, so I’ll go with December 3, 1980 as being the day of the birth. The last line of the poem gives the infant’s name as “Hannah.” So it’s a poem about Hannah S.F., a young woman now beginning her thirty-fifth year.

I had to Google for Clara Claiborne Park. I learned that she was a graduate of Radcliffe College who married her college sweetheart. The couple undertook graduate work in Michigan, where she studied English literature and he became a physicist. They moved to Massachusetts and had four children, the youngest of whom, Jessica, has autism. Clara Park continued to teach and to write poetry. In 1967, when Jessy was nine, Mrs. Park published The Siege, an account of her efforts to understand her daughter’s personality and find the best ways to help her live a full life. Autism itself was poorly understood then, and The Siege is considered groundbreaking. A sequel, Exiting Nirvana, appeared in 2001. Jessy, who had become an accomplished artist, was 43 then, employed in the mail room at Williams College, and able to live somewhat independently. Clara Park died at the age of 86 from complications following a fall.

Her obituary referred to two grandchildren. One obituary gave their names as Miranda and Lucius, so the Hannah S.F. to whom “Advent” is dedicated is not a grandchild. Clara Park would have been 57 when Hannah was born. A niece? A cousin? A friend’s child?

Here is where the power of poetry to “make you imagine beyond your means, make you feel the truths of lives that are not yours, and contemplate the life you have” becomes manifest. I do not need to know who Hannah is, how she is related to the poet, how the poet came to observe her infant hands and make a connection to the mysteries of Advent.

December 3 in 1980 was a Wednesday as well, and Advent had begun the Sunday before. I was at a crossroads in my life then. I’d had what would become my spiritual conversion experience exactly three months before, I’d followed the impulse it created to examine my life by undertaking a course in journal keeping, and then visited the church the instructor was the pastor of. As Hannah was being born into this world, I was being born into a new awareness of who I was and what I was about in it. Five years later I would be examining my own daughter’s fragile wrists and fingers as I planned the party to follow her baptism.

Today I read a poem that helped me remember a sweet, lovely time in my life, and introduced me to the work of a poet and her remarkable daughter whom I had never heard of before. And although I haven’t learned who Hannah S.F. is, I wish her well on this day.