"The Touch of the Master's Hand" by Myra Brooks Welch
Channel: The Formless Poet
Date: 2022-03-28

In introducing the poem, I mixed up "Welch" and "Brooks," getting them backwards. An innocent mistake. Because the recording overall came out alright, I opted to just keep it. C'est la vie.

I would have discovered this poem when I was 12, which is more or less when I discovered poetry in general. It was in a copy of "The Best Loved Poems of the American People" by DoubleDay Publishing that I found on the top floor of the administration center for a group home I lived in at the time. The group home had its own "school," which ostensibly was intended to prepare residents for regular school, and some residents did get picked up by bus and go off to regular school on weekday mornings.

The top floor of the administration building, however, is where kids went for the day when they were either so far behind that there was little hope of them ever catching up or they were so feral that there was little chance of ever taming them for a regular school environment—or both, as was the case with me.

I was behind, and I was feral. Make no mistake. But this book presented me with an opportunity I had never yet encountered. I knew how to read—I had and still have a gift for self-edification. And I knew how to use dictionaries and encyclopedias (which were printed in those days) to learn more about words and details I didn't yet know. So, between this book of poetry, dictionaries, and a Worldbook Encyclopedia that happened to sprawl across 2 full shelves on that top floor of the administration building, I began to organize my thoughts perhaps for the first time ever.

How does this poem play in? I'm not sure. I'm also not sure when I committed it to memory. But this poem is like the memory of old playgrounds in childhood for me—it's a thing that feels as if it has always been there, at least since my thoughts finally began to cohere from the utter chaos, neglect, and abuse that was my childhood.

At the time, I don't think I had a way of understanding just who "The Master" was or was meant to refer to. At some point, possibly in adulthood, I caught on to the fact that this probably referred to Jesus. But since the poem was already a part of my life, it existed separately from my Christian phase and continued to have meaning for me before and after. For instance, in the old Chan koans, there are many stories where a monk or servant meets with a Chan Master, has some dialog—or no dialog at all—and through the compassionate guidance (touch) of that master, that individual suddenly achieves realization. What a change to be wrought by the hand of a master! Right?

So I'm able to experience and appreciate this poem on numerous levels.

There's an odd phrase in the poem, "a mess of pottage." When the poem was written, this would have been well understood. Today, not so much. So I'll explain some. This is a Biblical reference to the story of Esau, the brother of Jacob, twins born to Isaac. Esau was the first-born (by like a few seconds), and so would naturally claim by birthright his father's lands and properties. One day he came in from working the fields and was so famished that he traded his birthright to his brother for a bowl of soup (pottage). If you learn more of the story, it becomes clear that Esau was never interested in the inheritance anyway and wanted to be left to follow his own path, but the phrase (not actually in the Bible) came to be well understood as implying, "To trade something of value for something trivial—" So, shortsightedness.

Same follows with "a glass of wine, a game, and he travels on." Brooks references a life of trivial pursuits and no effort to build oneself up toward something of greater meaning and value. Then this would have meant, "Giving oneself to Christ." Today it could mean pursuing an education and learning to tell the difference between news and misinformation, fact and opinion.

I recorded this poem once again using my WF-1000XM3 earbuds.