Brian Doyle was a luminous writer who died from a brain tumor in 2017 at the age of 60, an inexplicable injustice in this world if ever there was one.
According to this obituary in The Beacon, after he received his diagnosis, he said, “I’ll hear all laughter. Be tender to each other. Be more tender than you were yesterday, that’s what I would like. You want to help me? Be tender and laugh.”
God
by Brian Doyle
By purest chance I was out in our street when the kindergarten
Bus mumbled past going slow and I looked up just as all seven
Kids on my side of the bus looked at me and I grinned and they
Lit up and all this crap about God being dead and where is God
And who owns God and who hears God better than whom is the
Most egregiously stupid crap imaginable because if you want to
See God and have God see you and have this mutual perception
Be completely untrammeled by blather and greed and comment,
Go stand in the street as the kindergarten bus murmurs past. I’m
I delight in every ounce of his work (novels, essays, poems, and prose poems he called proems) and I’m on a mission to be a Brian Doyle completist. I corresponded with him only once, when I was seeking permission from Portland magazine (which he edited for many years) to reprint a story excerpt in one of my books. His emails were as charming as everything else of his I’ve ever read.
This week, because the magic of children has been on my mind, because children are pure and holy and dinosaur-loving vessels who deserve to be protected and flooded with love, I’m sharing this one, which I'd never read before today and just now seredipitously stumbled upon. I’d like to think Brian had something to do with that.
God is in the Kindergartener, is the Kindergartener. What a luminous and spot-on thought.
God
by Brian Doyle
By purest chance I was out in our street when the kindergarten
Bus mumbled past going slow and I looked up just as all seven
Kids on my side of the bus looked at me and I grinned and they
Lit up and all this crap about God being dead and where is God
And who owns God and who hears God better than whom is the
Most egregiously stupid crap imaginable because if you want to
See God and have God see you and have this mutual perception
Be completely untrammeled by blather and greed and comment,
Go stand in the street as the kindergarten bus murmurs past. I’m
Not kidding and this is not a metaphor. I am completely serious.
….
(Read the rest here.)
~~~~~~~~~~
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.
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