"Let us take care of the elders

for they have come a long way.

Let us take care of the children

for they have a long way to go.

Let us take care of those in between for they are doing the work." (Author unknown)

Would you call this a poem or a prayer? A good verse speaks to some yearning for recognition. Yearning and longing are constants, at least in my life. Other than church work, it took me until well into midlife to get a real (paying) job. By then, I had to admit I was never going to have the usual life trajectory.

My father used to sing a silly bit of doggerel verse, plugging in the nickname he'd crowned me with. "Oh, Gretchy's a flop. She swings a mean mop. She starts at the bottom instead of the top," he'd chant.

Oh, he was a tease, anyone will tell you, but this poem was his way of showing affection, kidding around, and maybe it was his way of getting me to lighten up. On summer nights, he'd pull the long spoon from his ice coffee, which had an inch of sugar sludge at the bottom, and when you weren't paying attention, slyly apply it to your arm. "Gotcha!" he'd say. He'd also put snow down your back when you helped him shovel the long driveway - as a way of saying thanks for the help.

I do tend to do things backwards, starting at either the top or bottom, whichever is the opposite of where everyone else would start, and verse, low or high, lodges in my brain. This might be one reason I became a poet, a craft where nothing is straightforward. My memory is quirky, too. Right now, for example, I'm recalling a ballad the British played in 1781 when they surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown, ending the Revolutionary War. It was "The World Turned Upside Down."

In her poem "A Summer's Day," Mary Oliver writes, "I don't know exactly what a prayer is." For her, prayer is to "kneel down in the grass" on a summer day, to be "idle and blessed," to study a grasshopper up close eating sugar from her hand. Elsewhere she writes, "To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work." Paying attention is the heart of our true work, to give witness to life unfolding in and around us. I've been serious my whole life and my work as a hospice chaplain draws on this trait. Sometimes, I pray with people, often Psalm 23 or a prayer for comfort and solace.

However, I notice there often comes a moment when I'll mention humor, if the subject hasn't come up, if everyone seems especially serious or grim. I'll note that what gets us through sometimes is our sense of humor. Not outright guffaws, but a quiet recognition that we can still be witty. What's great is that even in the worst of times, we can usually manage some humor. We use it, as my Dad did, to connect, to lighten the mood; it's how we get through the tough times. True, the end of life is no picnic, but we'll all get there, hopefully later rather than sooner.

A prayer or poem like the one I began with admits both seriousness and humor. The old platitude says you either laugh or you cry, sometimes at the same time. We laugh in recognition of all that cannot be put into words or only said in a prayer from the heart, or in a poem.

Oliver's poem reminds us there's still time "to be idle and blessed," and live without regrets or rancor. After spending the day wandering the wild fields, she returns to confront us with three questions:

"Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?"

Gretchen Robinson works as a chaplain for a local hospice. Her e-mail is whistling_girl@msn.com.