Today, as the winter solstice is fast approaching, I want to share one of my favorite poems with you. “Solstice” was written by my dear friend, the poet Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts, who I wrote about twice before, in Treasured Friendships—Part I, and Treasured Friendships—Part II. This potent poem is built around Elliot’s relationship with his parents, and it never fails to move me deeply. Elliot and I had a lovely chat via Zoom to discuss the poem, and I recorded him reading it so that you’re able to hear his voice and beautiful delivery.

Interviewing a friend is a treat I highly recommend! I discovered things about Elliot I never knew, such as when he was in college at Columbia in NYC in the 1950s, he served for a time as the managing editor of the university’s newspaper. This often meant that he had to physically carry the copy from late-breaking stories on the subway from 116th street down to the printer on 22nd street in the wee hours before dawn to get the paper printed on time. “Back then, I didn’t want to write poetry,” he told me, “but I did have a notion that I wanted to be a poet. I found the idea romantic.”

One of the reasons Elliot writes poetry is to help him deal with the challenges in his life. “Poetry is vital to me because I am a human being who needs to find ways to process my feelings. When my wife, Tey, died twelve years ago, poetry was an important part of how I coped with my grief.”

A day doesn’t go by when Elliot doesn’t write. “It’s one of the five things I make sure to do every single day,” he told me. Eager to know what the other four things are, I wasn’t disappointed. “Every day, in addition to journaling, I make sure to take a walk, practice Qigong, tell my partner how much I love her, and do a random act of kindness.” Curious for examples of such acts, he told me, “The opportunities to be kind are always there, we just may not recognize them as such. It’s often as simple as giving someone more room so they feel safer during COVID, or calling a friend to see how they are doing.”

Similar to my father, Elliot had an easy, loving relationship with his mother, while his relationship with his father was more difficult, complex and tense. “When my mother died,” Elliot told me, “I wrote just a single elegy to honor her. That was all I needed because there were so many expressions of love between us and I didn’t feel like we had any unresolved issues. In contrast, my father had a very hard time expressing or accepting love. We had left so much unsaid. When he died, I wrote poem after poem. Finally, I said ‘Enough!’ ‘Solstice’ is the poem that brought closure.”

Elliot has taught me the importance of letting each reader experience a poem in their own way, and also that sometimes what is unsaid becomes more powerful than what’s actually said. With this in mind, the last piece of background I will provide is to let you know that when Elliot’s poem talks about being in the hospital as a twelve-year-old, he was there because he’d contracted polio. It was in 1948, during the peak of the polio epidemic that was paralyzing or killing over half a million people every year.

“Polio was especially feared. There was a real terror of it,” Elliot explained. “I contracted it while I was at a summer camp. The owners didn’t want parents to know that campers were coming down with the disease because they were afraid kids would leave and they’d lose money. When I started showing symptoms, I was taken to the town’s mortuary where I was put in the back of a hearse. Two guys drove me from upstate New York to my local hospital in Brooklyn while I was alone in back. When we arrived, I could hear my mother calling my name while running to the hearse.”

Elliot’s mother was allowed to be with him while they did a spinal tap to confirm his diagnosis. After that, she could visit, but was only allowed to stand in the doorway of his room. One time, she arrived to find the whole ward closed to visitors.

And now, with gratitude to Elliot for sharing his gifts and his heart, here is “Solstice”—a poem that captures so much of the beauty and pain of being a human alive on this Earth.

Elliot’s most recent book of poems, White Fire, published by Ping-Pong Free Press, is available from the Henry Miller Memorial Library.