From Truth to Forgiveness

The two works "Love Medicine," by Louise Erdrich and This Is Just to Say, by William Carlos Williams have the common theme of the idea of forgiveness coming from telling the truth. Each work expresses what can come about from telling the truth, they just do it in different ways.
Williams' poem This is Just to Say is very short, but it gets it's point across. The poem is about the speaker eating something he knew he probably shouldn't have, but doesn't keep the fact that he did eat the plums a secret. In the end of the poem the speaker asks for forgiveness by saying, "Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold." (lines 9-12) So although the speaker is knows he did something he shouldn't have there isn't really a sense of regret, because he describes how good the plums were. An interesting aspect about this poem is the fact that there is no punctuation in the poem at all, and the only word that is capitalized is the word "Forgive," which adds emphasis to that point. I think that having no ending punctuation to the poem leads to the response that the speaker is going to receive, but we have no idea what the reaction is going to be, and neither does the speaker.
Erdrich's short story "Love Medicine" is much more descriptive and developed than Williams' poem. The story is about a boy and his grandparents and the grandmother and grandfather have seemed to grow apart. Lipsha knows that his grandpa "put the second childhood on himself." (pg 224) In other words the grandfather was intelligent enough to know what he was doing when he started to retreat his mind back to a place where he doesn't worry as much and he has forgotten things important to him. Lipsha also sees that this is hurting his grandma, because she loves the grandfather so much. Lipsha was known to have this "touch" that could heal people, but he couldn't bring himself to do it to his grandfather, because he knew what this boy was trying to do. This Native American tribe had a strong power known as love medicine, and Lipsha decided he was going to make his own for his grandparents. When he couldn't shoot the geese he bought turkey hearts and had them blessed and gave them to his grandma. She agreed to this because everytime she looked at him she had reoccuring feelings for "She loved him. She was jealous. She mourned him like the dead." (pg 225) When she went to get the grandfather to eat the heart he refused so when he put it in his mouth she slapped him on the back which made him choke, and eventually made him die. His presence was still there though, and finally Lipsha told him he had to go, and he did. After that he told his grandmother the truth about the hearts and what he had learned. He said to his grandma, "Love medicine ain't what brings him back to you, Grandma. He loved you over time and distance, but he went off so quick he never got the chance to tell you how he loves you, how he doesn't blame you, how he understands. It's true feeling, not no magic." (pg 236) When he told her the truth and explained what it did for him she forgave him. They were able to move on from the tramatic experience and learn from it by being truthful to themselves and each other.
Without the power of forgiveness being truthful would be extremely difficult. These two works show this idea, but in different ways. The one leaves it open to the reader to decide the reaction on whether to forgive or not, where the other gives the point very straight foward. Altough truth and forgiveness are two completely different ideas they go hand and hand with each other.