The land goes on like mercy, out and around forever

"For the Sake of One We Love, and Are Losing" by Phyllis Cole-Dai

As Phyllis Cole-Dai sees it, she is more a “custodian” of the poem “For the Sake of One We Love and Are Losing” than she is its author.

“I think of it as one of those that were gifted to me,” she said recently. “I really didn’t want to take credit for it.”

The now widely traveled, meditative, at times incantatory, poem, after all, owes its existence more to the writer’s “rich dream life” than to lengthy craft sessions at the keyboard, Cole-Dai will tell you. The South Dakota poet, editor, novelist, and musician was attending a writing retreat in California—working on a novel, The Singing Stick, now due out in the fall—when her dream life served up “For the Sake of One We Love and Are Losing” in February 2020, largely reader-ready, and before the full impact of the pandemic had been felt in the U.S. (Cole-Dai was to lose her own father to COVID.)

When she awoke from the dream, she “scribbled some notes and went back to sleep,” she said. She found those notes again after she had returned to her home, and she began shaping the work by making a recording of it, a not uncommon technique for her.

“Sometimes when I am too smitten with words, I do visual or auditory [versions]. It’s important that we follow that nudge that the music gives us.”

That’s not to say that there was no tweaking to work the poem into its final form, but “the images were given to me,” Cole-Dai said.

Those images, rendered in accessible but richly evocative language, often take the reader into deep mysteries where words alone cannot go:

“We will set regrets like candles/upon the still waters/to float away.”

“We will hang old wounds upon distant stars/whose light can absorb their weight.”

“The particulars of a poem can lift us into the universal,” she said.

Cole-Dai also shared the new poem with fellow poets for feedback, and received high praise from such literary mainstays as Barara Crooker, James Crews, and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer (both Crooker and Wahtola Trommer, and their own poems of loss, are featured in past editions of “How to Grow a Poem” and are available in the archives).

Cole-Dai is the author or editor od more than a dozen books, has produced four music albums, and writes the Substack “The Raft,” among many other creative and spiritual pursuits. A bio appears below, following her poem. “For the Sake of One We Love and Are Losing” is itself available on Cole-Dai’s website in a number of different formats, including a special edition book, an audio version with music, a condolence card, and a downloadable pdf. You can hear the audio version here.

As much as the delivery vehicles might change, however, the poem remains firmly rooted in that dream, Cole-Dai said. In the dream, a large group gathers to celebrate the life of a never named dying family member, who asks that they all join in in reciting a poem to be found in a turquoise book on a shelf in the room.

The book, Cole-Dai noted in her “scribbles” that night was titled “For the Sake of One We Love and Are Losing,” as was the poem.

Here then is the poem that pretty much wrote itself.

FOR THE SAKE OF ONE WE LOVE 

AND ARE LOSING 

For the sake of one we love 
and are losing, 
we will not be afraid. 
But when we are afraid 
we will embrace what we fear 
as if it were a lost child 
crying in our arms. 
We will not walk away 
from what needs to be seen 
and cared for. 
We will not walk away. 

For the sake of one we love 
and are losing, 
we will praise. 
We will speak words of light. 
We will let our thoughts rise 
like a ring of smoke 
widening into blue sky. 

For the sake of one we love 
and are losing, 
we will let go the things 
we do not understand. 
We will set regrets like candles 
upon the still waters 
to float away 
on their own time. 
We will hang old wounds upon distant stars 
whose light can absorb their weight. 
All these will pass 
beyond our need to see. 

For the sake of one we love 
and are losing, 
we will not cling. 
We will hold the hand gently. 
We will wrap the body with fresh linens. 
We will lay our head upon the shoulder. 
We will bless the forehead 
with tears and kisses. 
All that has gone unspoken 
because it could not be said before 
will be said by this. 

For the sake of one we love 
and are losing, 
we will suffer the final limits 
of our devotion. 
Death we cannot control. 
Death we cannot fix. 
This is the rock upon which we are split. 
We cannot rise 
yet still we will rise 
to do the one more impossible thing. 

For the sake of one we love 
and are losing, 
we will ready ourselves 
to be more alone. 
This is not a betrayal of the beloved. 
It is acceptance of the branching paths 
on the journey shared. 
Before the great farewell, 
we will break bread together. 
We will draw water from the well 
and lift it to one another’s lips. 
What we need is here. 

Each day that we have 
danced and endured, 
every certain step 
and stumble 
has prepared us 
for just this. 

We will be present 
within the goodbye 
so long as it lasts. 
We do not know how 
perfectly we can love 
through our imperfections. 
We cannot know what 
we are made of 
until they who have helped make us 
leave us. 

For the sake of one we love 
and are losing, 
we will go. 
We will make our parting 
not knowing how. 
The road ends just ahead 
but the land goes on. 
The land goes on like mercy, 
out and around forever. 


—Phyllis Cole-Dai 

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Bio: I began pecking away on an old manual typewriter in childhood and never stopped. My work explores things that tend to divide us, so that we might wrestle our way into deeper understandings of ourselves and others.

I have authored or edited more than a dozen books in multiple genres, including poetry, memoir, and fiction. My second novel, The Singing Stick, will be published in September, 2024. Other recent titles include Poetry of Presence II: More Mindfulness Poems (2023; co-edited with Ruby R. Wilson); Staying Power: Writings from a Year of Emergence (2022); and Staying Power: Writings from a Pandemic Year (2021). A full listing of titles is available at my website. I encourage you to purchase my books there or from your favorite local bookshop.

I have also published four music albums: Beautiful Is the Moon (2003), Friends (2006), Child of All Earth (2007), and ‘Tis a Gift: Christmas by Guitar (2009).

Born in 1962 in the farming community of Mt. Blanchard, Ohio, I eventually graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (English, 1984) from Goshen College; a Master of Theological Studies (1987) from the Methodist Theological School; and a Master of Arts (English, 1993) from The Ohio State University.

I now live with my scientist-husband and two cats in a cozy 130-year-old house in Brookings, South Dakota. Son Nathan is my greatest joy.