Posted on Thursday, January 9, 2025
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by AMAC, Robert B. Charles
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0 Comments
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On the one hand, we have much to look forward to – a new president, new energy, and new enthusiasm for the future. On the other, the ease with which we displace people with politics nags, makes me think we have lost something worth recapturing. News has its place, but it is always behind people.
Up in Maine, we like “old timers,” and maybe all the Nation does, but none is so poetic or occasionally prophetic as our own Robert Frost. He lived a life with more sadness than most know, lost kids and lost loves, between poetic bouts with woodpiles, stonewalls, and snow.
Reading him again, how he rallied in the 1920s – a time that “roared” for many, but whispered to him – I was taken by what happens when you read his poems side by side, trying to follow his thinking as he watches life accelerate, how he wanted people to keep people first, news second.
Two short pieces popped off the page to me, and I reintroduced them to you here. They made me think, more accurately wonder: Was he saying something a hundred years ago worth rehearing?
The first piece is entitled “A Patch of Old Snow.” The piece is short, seemingly simple, or not.
“There’s a patch of old snow in a corner
That I should have guessed
Was a blow-away paper the rain
Had brought to rest.
It is speckled with grime as if
Small print overspread it,
The news of a day I’ve forgotten—
If I ever read it.”
So, what was that about? Whimsy? Commentary on how white snow becomes less so? How we misjudge things? The nature of news? True enough, the poem was written in 1930, onset of the Great Depression.
Then read his lighter, more deliberate, simpler “A Time to Talk” from 1923.
“When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaningful walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.”
Now think on the two side by side, one a few off-the-cuff lines about snow – which melts to nothing – and an old newspaper, the other about stopping life’s chores to do what matters more, talk with a neighbor, give the gift of time.
Why I say we may have lost something worth recapturing is, put side by side, how many would forgo news for time with a neighbor today? How many would prioritize things in that way?
What Frost reminds us is that news, like snow, will come and go, but people – even the least among us – are always people, always worth stopping for, more important, when you get right down to it than news or chores.
Maybe not, maybe so, maybe we will never know, but that’s my view, and why many up this way – perhaps like you – honor the “old timers” and what they knew.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC. Robert Charles has also just released an uplifting new book, “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024).
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