“The Goodness of the Lord in the Land of the Living” by Leslie Bustard

You reach an age when you’re reminded, sometimes daily, that the time you have left is increasingly less than the time you have lived. Responses to that understanding vary. You can rush to fulfill everything you have on a real or imagined bucket list. You can sit back and take stock of the life you have lived. You can ignore it and live life as if your days will never end. Or you can accept what you’ve realized and live each day alive in what you’ve learned. 

That last response isn’t as easy as it sounds. The urgency of life can keep getting in the way. 

 

Reading The Goodness of the Lord in the Land of the Living: Selected Poems tells me I’ve met someone who’s discovered how to live each day alive in what she learned. But as Leslie Anne Bustard might likely say, knowing it and doing it can be difficult propositions, hard propositions. Sometimes really hard, so hard that they’re impossible without divine intervention. And that, of course, is the key – divine intervention. That’s what undergirds these poems – the knowledge that even as you face increasingly fewer days left in your life, you are not alone. You have family. You have friends and neighbors. 

 

Leslie Anne Bustard

And, most importantly of all, you have God. Without God, your waning days can become a terrifying ordeal of not knowing. It’s scary enough even with God.

 

Bustard divides this collection into several sections. About half of the poems are grouped by seasons of the year – spring, summer, autumn, and winter. They’re followed by a group of ekphrastic poems inspired by works of art (she likes Rembrandt, Rouault, Cezanne, Monet, and Andrew Wyeth). These are followed by a group of found poems, the reworking of existing texts as new poems. And finally she has a group of tanka poems (poems of 31 syllables in five lines). 

 

What do we learn from these poems?

 

Time is short. Use your gifts. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love God. Creation is a wonderful thing. Let people love you. Bad things, like cancer, can happen. Good things can happen. Bad things, like cancer coming back, can happen. But, in faith, we keep moving forward.

 

Thursday

 

Sunday night when I learned there was more cancer,

that a year of fighting had not held off another tumor,

 

the place inside me where I imagine my emotions reside

was a yawning cavern, empty.

 

I decided it was denial, and et myself sleep long

and nap and wander around.

I thought of praying.

 

But today,

with the expanse of blue sky above me

and the silver drip of icicles I passed while walking the dog,

 

I know I must be waking up.

 

For as I walked into the kitchen,

I thought of soups I want to make and

cookies I want to bake.

 

I looked for the Dickens book packed away in the basement.

I thought of pencil and paper and images and words.

 

I even hung the wooden red-and-white heart sign

from last Valentine’s Day and

made dinner for you and me.

 

Bustard is a contributor to several publications, including The Black Barn Online, Story Warren, Anselm Society, and Call Press, and a Fellowship member of The Cultivating Project. She was a co-editor for Wild Things and Castles in the Sky: A Guide to Choosing the Best Books for Children (2022). She’s a vice president at Square Halo and hosts their podcast series. She lives with her family in Pennsylvania.

 

Find a quiet day, or a hectic day, and read the poems of The Goodness of the Lord in the Land of the Living. You’ll discover, as I did that the world, even in its fallen state, contains so much beauty that it’s downright astonishing.