“My days are like an evening shadow”

                 Memorial weekend is considered by many to be the unofficial start of summer and they look forward to picnics, a trip to the beach or some other pleasurable activity. Originally, the day was meant to honor fallen service men and women, as well as loved ones who have died, and many people will visit cemeteries to do just that.

                Visiting a cemetery is a time to remember others, but it is also a time to reflect. The silent headstones tell us more than names and dates. They speak to us of mortality. Including our own mortality. We may not actually go to a cemetery but Memorial Day still prompts us to reflect on our mortality.

                I thought of this recently while reading in the Psalms. More than one psalm speaks of our mortality. Many echo what the psalmist said in Psalm 102: “My days pass away like smoke . . . my days are like an evening shadow; . . . I wither away like grass.”

                Poets have picked up on the imagery of the words, “my days are like an evening shadow.” Gerhard Frost wrote these lines:

                    “Time to come in now!” The mellow voice of love in

The darkening dust of a distant day,

my barefoot, carefree days of firefly lanterns,

cricket-chirped curfews

and the serious business of play.

No harshness to remember, but firmness born of care,

The loving care of Mother; She knew how much we liked to play.

“Time to come in now!” I seem to hear God say

in the deepening dusk of my sunset day.

God knows how much I want to stay.

                (Gerhard Frost, “God Knows,” in Seasons of a Lifetime, p. 153)

                 How shall we face our mortality and the “evening shadow?” This unexpressed question must be in my mind when I go to bed because I often, not always, but often go to sleep reciting another poem to myself. It is a short poem, written by a woman of faith, Jane Kenyon, whose “evening shadow” came early because of breast cancer. It is titled: “Let Evening Come.”

 Let the light of late afternoon

Shine through chinks in the barn, moving

Up the bales as the sun moves down.

 Let the cricket take up chafing

As a woman takes up her needles

And her yarn. Let evening come.

 Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned

In long grass. Let the stars appear

And the moon disclose her silver horn.

 Let the fox go back to its sandy den.

Let the wind die down. Let the shed

Go black inside. Let evening come.

 To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop

In the oats, to air in the lung

Let evening come.

 Let it come, as it will, and don’t

Be afraid. God does not leave us

comfortless, so let evening come.

                (The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon. Graywolf Press, 2020, p. 58).

                Jane Kenyon could write this because of her faith in one whose life was cut short by a cross. His “evening shadow” also came much too early, as we humans count lifespans. But he trusted in the all-powerful God of creation to see him through “the valley of the shadow of death” to the victory banquet that lay ahead.   

                 On this Memorial weekend, as we consider our mortality, God does not leave us comfortless because of him who died and rose again on our behalf. Because of him we face our mortality with a living hope. Today, especially, we heed his invitation: “Do this in remembrance of me.”