The Poetry Life: Ten Stories [I rise before the sun does]
I rise before the sun does. Each morning I sit on the edge of the bed with my feet planted on the unlovely linoleum floor and I say slowly but quite distinctly to the darkness, "Sweet joy befall thee." I feel like an actor speaking the first words of a play except my life is no play nor does my soul need an audience. What I do need is confidence. I've built my life up from very shaky ground and William Blake, the man who wrote that line, has been a godsend to me. The human voice that speaks a poem rises from a powerful well; we take it for granted but a voice is an advent of spirit. I know from attending numerous churches during my haphazard childhood that the joy that preachers trumpet comes in a box with grievous dimensions. Their salvation is a machine of wrath; they break your back on hell so you can get to heaven. The joy I invoke can go where it chooses because it resides in our being alive. The joy I invoke is Blake's Jerusalem, the city we can build each day through kindness: "The most sublime act is to set another before you." No one has ever called the place where I work "sublime," so I need that word, too.
From The Poetry Life: Ten Stories by Baron Wormser. Copyright © 2008 by Baron Wormser. Used by permission of Cavankerry Press. All rights reserved.
Baron Wormser
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on February 4, 1948, Baron Wormser grew up in Baltimore, where he attended high school at Baltimore City College. He studied English at Johns Hopkins University and received his MA in English from the University of California, Irvine, in 1970. That same year he moved to Maine, where he worked as a librarian for twenty-five years and taught poetry writing at the University of Maine at Farmington. From 1975 to 1998 Wormser lived with his family in an off-the-grid house on forty-eight acres of land in Mercer.