Meditation

Born Still, is Shan’s Meditation which she presented at Phillips Exeter Academy, Phillips Church, April 10, 1997. Shan’s parents, Pamela and Bob, have made small edits to the original copy of Born Still; those edits primarily spring from small changes Shan made when she presented her meditation to the PEA community. The edits also include a very few punctuation and spelling changes.

Shannon’s Meditation begins and ends with two songs by The Pogues. And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda begins her work and I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Every Day ends it. The lyrics are included in their proper order here and are set down as they are sung in The Pogues recording, RUM SODOMY AND THE LASH, which Shan used for her reading.

Please feel free to contact Shan’s parents, Pamela Bailey Powers and Robert M. Powers at powersbob@hotmail.com, Zach Iscol, and Patrick Sweeney if you have questions or need more information. (Zach’s and Patrick’s email addresses are available upon request.)

Click Here to Listen to Shannon

Present Her Senior Meditation: Born Still

From The Pogues: And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda

. . .He chased us with bullets, he rained us with shells

And in five minutes flat he’d blown us all to hell

Nearly blew us right back to Australia

And the band played Waltzing Matilda

As we stopped to bury our slain

And we buried ours and the Turks buried theirs

Then it started all over again

Now those that were lain did their best to survive

In a mad world of blood, death and fire

And for seven long weeks I kept myself alive

While around me the corpses piled higher

Then a big Turkish shell knocked me arse over tit

And when I awoke in my hospital bed

They saw what they had done; Christ, I wished I was dead

Never knew there were worse things than dying

And no more I’ll go waltzing Matilda

All through the green bushes so far and near

For to hang tent and pegs, a man needs two legs

No more waltzing Matilda for me

So they collected the cripples, the wounded, and maimed

And they shipped us back home to Australia

The legless, the armless, the blind and insane

Those proud wounded heroes of Suvla

And as our ship pulled into Circular Quay

I looked at the place where me legs used to be

And thank Christ there was nobody waiting for me

To grieve and to mourn and to pity

And the band played Waltzing Matilda

As they carried us down the gangway

But nobody cheered, they just stood and stared

Then turned their faces away

And now every April I sit on my porch

And I watch the parade pass before me

I see my old comrades, how proudly they march

Reliving the dreams of past glory

I see the old men march all twisted and torn

The forgotten heroes from a forgotten war

And the young people ask, “What are they marching for?”

And I ask myself the same question

And the band played Waltzing Matilda

And the old men still answer the call

But year after year their numbers get fewer

Some day no one will march there at all

Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda

Who’ll come a Waltzing Matilda with me?

Born Still

by Shannon Nissa Bailey Powers

Infinitely Loved and Loving

January 1, 1979-Midnight, November 17, 2003

This is for my parents.

The flush comes after the meds have run their course. The medicine is painless on entry. You can follow the first of it: a rush; up the arm, cold in the shoulder, through the neck into the lungs. Then you lose time. Aware of the mucus being cleaved away from its fleshy walls, making you whole again. Ignorant of the minutes. Yellow serum runs fast. The last of it, diluted and warm, leaves you empty.

The flush comes now. Skin around the needle’s stem is left sore and tired. Veins, red and soft, are dirty. God, it stings when it goes in. Takes its time to push the last remnants out and through. Then, once that is gone, it continues to flow. Clear and pallid like water, it drips from the bag to the tube, through the spike, through the vein. Only repairing injury, assuring open passage. Does nothing but flow and take you along. Every moment drip drip drip — you can sleep, awake and still it flows.

Until the instant you look away and the last of it fades down, and disappears into you.

There had never been a thought of living. Never been hope for a cure. I took pills, three with meals, two others every six hours. I always had. I figured I would forever. Mothering was far from me when I found out people with Cystic Fibrosis die from Cystic Fibrosis. Reflection was far from me. I played a different role, the child, the movie star. So, content with pretend games and my father’s puppets, I accepted dying young. A life expectancy can bestow great freedom. Knowing where you stand and a respect for the time you have. My end was a part of my life. There was no fear. There was no regret.

I never paid attention in the doctor’s office when my mother would question new developments and treatments. I was always restless to leave. I knew I could run. I knew that was good. I knew that when I came in for pulmonary function tests everyone was overjoyed to have me puff into the machine. I was an exception to the rule. I didn’t know. I couldn’t read the numbers. The skinny boy with the red face had one quarter my lung capacity. I didn’t know; I knew he was half my age. I knew I could run, I knew that was good, I knew they studied my disease. I knew it was in a laboratory. I knew Children’s was my hospital. And, goddamn it, above all I knew I was going to die. But then I was given “a chance.” There was the doctor’s prognosis:

“She could live to be forty, thirty. If she keeps up her health, her lung function is higher than my own.” I planned to be dead by twenty-eight. I was quietly devastated. Stripped of my consistency, my certainty, the answers to my mother’s drawn-out concerned questions made me hope . . . Thus began my desire to die.

People revolted me. I had no tolerance for their habits nor their seemingly false relations with one another. I liked being alone; it was cleaner that way, less to lose. I saw old women decorating themselves. They pencil in eyebrows, plucking at black hairs springing from moles. The fat ones wear skinny shoes as disguise, their feet ballooning out from the tops in great, bulging humps. I would watch their baggy faces squint at babies, their tongues slapping their lips after each breath, flicking futilely in attempt to moisten their ancient, wrinkled mouths. I hated them. They were so gray -no- pale blue, so used they were transparent. I loathed their ignorance; their belief that any reason other than medicine preserved their decrepit shells, allowing them to drag on day after day. I envied it. I hated them for going on. I hated them for leaving me, my beauty, my young face, behind.

What right had they?

There was no sanction in youth either. I felt so far from any innocence. I knew one can go only for so long with no recognition of time. The children on my street, at whom I would peer from my living room window, were too bright. Their clothes — neon colors, pink hair ties, orange jeans — were blinding. I could hear their voices echo and screech each moment of day light, and it tortured me. The children were vibrant. They would dart across streets like dragon flies, never noticing me in my solitude nor having to. They were their own meaning, each the center of a universe consisting of those who loved them. They had eyes only for the relevant, the beautiful. I sat and waited for those children to wane, to grow. Though, to my eyes they never got any taller. The mothers would stand by, some still plump from delivery, cradling pink fleshy bundles of urine an vein. (Have you noticed you can see the veins in a baby, in its temples, its neck, its ankles?) They would walk with their children, speaking to them in tones of anger, love and praise. The children would respond to their voices. The sons walked like the fathers. Daughters would race each evening to jump into the arms of dads just arrived from work.

Sweet was life, and I hated it. It seemed so lost to me. I had given up all I saw before me. So I spent time concentrating on watching people live as though through an hour glass. I envied the dead babies, for they did not know their fate. I believed I clung, rotting, to life. The babies had fulfilled their destiny at conception – to die, to pass away. They summoned no courage; they did not need to recognize their lives had been milked sour. That is all I let myself see, and I was afraid. Unable to live with the uncertainty of death, I scorned its members. Mothers, fathers, old women, and their children decorate life; they help us pass our time with beauty. I pretended their presence abhorred me, when in truth I felt only envy. I envied soft wrinkles and fading pink in cheeks. I longed to hold my arms in gentle curves around and towards a child, my child. Innocence and make-believe were lost to me, my father had become mortal; just a man. And, as hard as I had pushed during this time of my life, I could not cleave myself away from my drive to continue. I hated life because I did not have the courage to let it go.

Sidney’s eyes were dark and yellowed about the edges, long lashes, spiraling glances towards and away from me. We sat on the stoop in Harvard Square every day to “spare change” for booze and cigarettes. He looked sick, but he was smart and he had a full smile. Bouncing when he walked, he told how life was to be eaten, spent quickly, and spread out. He told me everything I wanted to hear. The sun was bright and hot every day. And every day a group of punks and he and I would march each afternoon into the graveyard to sip drinks and pass time away. He loved me because I smelled good and was clean. He loved me because I was innocent. He loved me because I was smart enough to know why he drank and because I wanted to be taken along. We both wanted to speed things up a bit — to run out faster. He was running out faster; he had been trying longer. He had created his own death as I was struggling to do. We spent the days wrapped in each other, wrapped in a comfortable destructive pattern, wrapped in the sun and the trees of the graveyard. The nights we spent in the Somerville house, with any punks, skins, or lost alcoholics who could provide wine or rent. The nights were so much slower than the days. It is slower to be drunk in the night because there is no movement in the street or in the clouds to distract from reason.

Before passing out each night, Sidney hunched himself over the wooden record player. His small body, in black tattered clothes, wrapped itself into itself. Boxed wine in a Christy’s cup, stolen from the trash, swayed with his hand. The red liquid would spill over and follow the lines of his hand down to his wrist onto the black vinyl.

The mattress was soaked in yellows and grays. Ingrained by ashes, bits of dirt carried in by the bottom of our boots, hair, and spit, it was one of three in the front room. We would begin sleep entwined, soft and still. But his body fell from

consciousness always before mine, and then our separation would begin. Sid’s breathing echoed in my ear, shattering the in-and-out pattern set by those sleeping around us. In the dark, I lay encased by the smell of cheap liquor, urine and bodies.

I concentrated on his throat’s heaves and crackles. The sound scared me, even as it assured me that he was still with me. His eyes, waning yellow moons, would flicker and roll beneath their sunken lids. Each finger strained apart from the other, clenched as if grasping an apple from its perch. His arms were crossed over his chest and would jerk pushing me throughout the night. His hands filled the space between the jaw and shoulder, hugging his neck, squeezing as he twitched. His feet kicked and stiffened and kicked and stiffened. His muscles rolled him over and back as his veins began their withdrawal. He sweat to clear himself of the poison; he shook from the lack of it. His belly rippled, aching with the absence of sweet alcohol.

I would lie close and awake, smelling, feeling gravel falling from creases into my ears, sticking to my neck. I would shape my body around him as he twisted. I tried to hold him as I had in the beginning of our sleep. Each night it was this play of illness and love. Each night as I wrapped about him I thought how it would be if the shaking stopped. Would it be then that his heart would fill with fatigue and finally rest? I wished it would and prayed for his salvation. I never slept. I never closed my eyes, only rotated night after night around his fading, longing, body.

* * * *

There was beauty in Sidney Grindstaff. He let me go because he knew I did not belong caught and dying with him. He touched my face and kissed me once. With our parting I began the return from the swirl of sex and fists and smoke which had carried me for so long. I had lost time. I had burned away my fear of death, embracing self-destruction. I had not noticed my jeans fading and beginning to smell. I had not noticed smoking a pack a day. I had not noticed my hair reeking of alcohol and sweat. And before I knew it, I was cleared of my envy to live. I had grown again to expect to die. In this familiar expectancy I searched for the comfort and freedom which had existed before they began to find cures for Cystic Fibrosis. I found nothing, and I realized why.

“But you started out whole, Sidney.”

“I’m not anything now. Do you know how much I sleep, Shannon? Fourteen, eighteen hours a day. I’m dying more than you.”

“Fuck you, you started out okay.”

I had found salvation in another person killing himself because it was a comfort not to be the only one. Then, with the remembrance of this conversation held on a stoop outside a glasses shop beside an alley in Harvard Square, fighting for my friend or lover or killer to stop drinking, I knew the difference. He had not begun with swollen blood vessels in his throat. A sign of the final stages of

alcoholism, they bled and streaked his vomit bright red. His face had not always been thin and drawn. His hands were once stable in the mornings, not shaking so hard he couldn’t twist the cap off the bottle. Sid had eaten himself away. I had begun broken; he had begun whole. He had no one to stop him, no one had cared, and he had taken his lovely body and ruined it. He knows what he has done and though his eyes brim with hope that he could be wrong, his smile betrays his faith and in his sweet face I know he knows what he has done. And it is in my grief for you, Sidney, that I find the strength to recognize what I have. Yes I began with less than you. My lungs were already rotting at my birth. I cannot digest food alone. I cannot fight off sickness. And I may not live much longer than you. I am angry at you because you are beautiful and you should live longer. But I am angry at myself for committing your sin in not recognizing what I have. My mother loves me and has given everything to save her little girl. She remained in the doctor’s office, after every appointment, with my dad, while I would play in the hall. The same hope in her eyes as in yours. I am guilty. I have taken life for granted. I have thought only of my own fears and anxiety. I have risked AIDS, drug addiction and happiness because I could not take responsibility to live. How I searched for experience! How I wanted to be cured of my mortality quickly, like medicine through my I.V.! In my quest I have lost innocence, pride and simplicity. I am guilty. I tell my mother of my guilt, and she writes me a poem. It ends, “This is the child of light.” I do not see myself as light. I have done much wrong and caused much pain to those who love m e. But. Still. My mother tells me that I am Yeats’ Glimmering girl, with apple blossom in her hair plucking golden apples from the sun. She is a poet, she tells me how I am.

Her poem tells a story. My father and mother meet with baskets of fruit, blankets, and sunlight at the Dell. From his plane over Plum Island, off the garnet shore of Massachusetts, my grandfather would greet my grandmother during the war; there, too, my father would woo my mother, call out to her, she among the bayberries and salt pans. I was born the first of January. My mother wrapped me in wool and linen, called me her baby bunting. She sang, tuneless and comforting, throughout my childhood. She and my father watched as I hunted through the grasses of my aunt — my grandmother’s — house, for eggs colored pink and pale blue. They watched me discover dresses and wars. I built with blocks; I received presents; I read alone in dim light. They led this new life towards its point, while always preserving its youth. Apple, pear, Mirabel plum; Wild Hickory moon; After the leaf fall, holding the stem. These images, magical and earthy, allow me to tie together imagination and reality.

My mother has told me of my beauty, my joy. She holds me close and through her arms whispers her truth unto me. She sees me whole and unbroken. Her verse sings my innocence. Born of her, I know that what she tells is part of me. Mobiles, fairies and horses become familiar to me once more. Her eyes, hazed in unconditional love, produce words. I read them over, and I am this child of light.

* * * *

I now live my life as a calm mixture of living and dying. I take the breeze into my hair and let it blow through the curls and away. I am not reaching to live or to hate or to fall. I am not reaching at all. I have been given a chance and a perspective. I see what is possible. I accept what is not. I forgive myself for giving away some of me, I forgive myself for taking away some of my mother and my father.

I still love Sidney, but I haven’t spoken to him in awhile. I am taking a new medicine called DNase. It thins the mucus in my lungs so that I can live longer. I am not sure how much. I am HIV negative; I am not sure how. I think I might be falling in love again. I’m not sure if that’s fair. I am thankful. I am not yet ready to die. But at least I can say I love what is mortal.

* * * *

So on comes the flush. It hurts as it pushes through and extracts remnants of anger and love and fear. It burns on entry, because I am sore and a little tired. After some time though, the jagged edges of my insides fuse together once more.

Walls are thinner, but holes are filled. Flow continues to flow. Clear and pallid. I am still. I am awake. I cannot feel its motion, no push no pull, it just exists and carries me onward. I will not know for sure where it ends. It will fade into me and complete me. And that will be the end. As we all have an end and we are all forever fading into ourselves and away.

My life streams through me — I am unaware of its pace and purpose. I am awed by its power and brevity. Respectful of its belonging to me. Wondrous of its departure and, though I am not yet unfaltering, when the time comes, I hope to die victorious —

— content to let it go.

I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Every Day

The Pogues

Oh my name is Jock Stewart

I’m a canny gun boy

And a roving young fellow I’ve been

So be easy and free