Tag: Remembrance

The Color of a Pivoting Ear

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Near dusk, near a path, near a brook,
we stopped, I in disquiet and dismay
for the suffering of someone I loved,
the doe in her always incipient alarm.

All that moved was her pivoting ear
the reddening sun was shining through
transformed to a color I’d only seen
in a photo of a new child in a womb.

Nothing else stirred, not a leaf,
not the air, but she startled and bolted
away from me into the crackling brush.

The part of my pain which sometimes
releases me from it fled with her, the rest,
in the rake of the late light, stayed.
~C. K. Williams  “The Doe” from The Singing

Oh little one
who was to be born this week in June
forty one years ago~
so wanted
so anticipated
but lost too soon
gone as swiftly in a clot of red
as a doe disappearing in a thicket:
a memory, when I think of you
that makes me question if you were real —
but you were
and you are
and someday
I’ll know you when I see you
and curious about who I am,
you won’t flee,
but remain close to find out.

AI image created for this post
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The Grey Crossing

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“Your attention, please,” the mate’s voice says,
“we are slowing a moment for a memorial,”
and sure enough we all do, all of us, even those
entangled in a bustle to get to the other side,
restless chunks of festering business waiting,
little urgencies pricking us into a stressed huff.
Below on the car deck a small group slowly forms,
and a mate lowers a rope, beckons them forward,
the ferry engines slowing whatever our hurry,
and we are all coasting together on a rainy sea.

A heavy-set woman unwraps a nondescript urn
from a carefully held towel, handing it in turn
to an ungainly boy, a shy girl, an older man,
and she watches as each tips the urn to scatter
dust into a windy vortex off the ferry’s stern,
a fine grey mist streaming over the roiled wake
in a high breeze before settling, disappearing
into grey oblivion of sea, sky, and late afternoon.

As the ferry’s horn sounds three long blasts,
the four bow heads. The woman hesitates,
hides her face a moment in the towel, kisses
each of her party, and shakes the mate’s hand.
He speaks, his words lost to us in sea sounds
and engines, then looks up to the bridge, waves,
and the small group, holding hands, rejoins
some two hundred of us who have in silence
watched this mini-delay in our grey crossing.
The ferry’s engines begin their normal thrum
to push us forward again against a grey sea
and under a low, grey sky, where a fine dust
disappeared, and white seagulls rise and cry.
~Rob Jacques, “Memorial, Washington State Ferry” from Adagio for Su Tung-p’o

There is a sense of timelessness while riding on the ferry runs between the islands and peninsulas in Washington state. While driving my car on the busy freeways in the region, I am at the mercy of the weather, other drivers and all manner of delays. When I’m on a ferry, I become mere witness, only a rider seeking peaceful passage. Someone else worries about safely getting from Point A to Point B.

I’m able to breathe: watching the waves and the wake, the antics of gulls and cormorants, and rarely, an orca pod.

Next week is a time of memorial and remembrance of those who have passed into eternity. The ashes of my parents rest in the ground under a plaque that I visit annually with my family. Dad would have preferred his ashes to be cast out upon on the open water that he loved, but Mom chose a cemetery plot for them both, a more familiar resting place for a girl who grew up in the Palouse farmlands, no where near large bodies of water.

Last year, a good friend chose to be composted; he rests now in his beloved orchard, feeding the trees that continue to bear fruit.

No matter where our mortal bodies eventually find our rest, we hope to be remembered.

Our souls have risen, free.

video taken on the Samish Sea (Puget Sound) from my friend Andrew
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To Come Alive Again

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This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises, 
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open —
pools of lace, 
white and pink —

and all day
under the shifty wind, 
as in a dance to the great wedding,

the flowers bend their bright bodies, 
and tip their fragrance to the air, 
and rise, 
their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness 
gladly and lightly, 
and there it is again — 
beauty the brave, the exemplary,

blazing open. 
Do you love this world? 
Do you cherish your humble and silky life? 
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden, 
and softly, 
and exclaiming of their dearness, 
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling, 
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?
~Mary Oliver from New And Selected Poems 

The peonies, too heavy with their beauty,
slump to the ground. I had hoped
they would live forever but ever so slowly
day by day they’re becoming the soil of their birth
with a faint tang of deliquescence around them.
Next June they’ll somehow remember to come alive again,
a little trick we have or have not learned.
~Jim Harrison “Peonies” from In Search of Small Gods

Later this month, I will bring our peonies
to the graves of those from whom I came,
to lay one after another exuberant floral head
upon each headstone,
a moment of connection between those in the ground
and me standing above, acknowledging its thin space
when one more humble and silky life shatters,
its petals slowly
scatter, lush and trembling,
to the wind.

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Irreplaceable

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More like a vault — you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
And what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged. This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,
shining red in their liquid, exotic,
aloof, slumming
in such company: a jar
of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters
full, fiery globes, like strippers
at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino,
the only foreign word I knew. Not once
did I see these cherries employed: not
in a drink, nor on top
of a glob of ice cream,
or just pop one in your mouth. Not once.
The same jar there through an entire
childhood of dull dinners — bald meat,
pocked peas and, see above,
boiled potatoes. Maybe
they came over from the old country,
family heirlooms, or were status symbols
bought with a piece of the first paycheck
from a sweatshop,
which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,
handed down from my grandparents
to my parents
to be someday mine,
then my child’s?
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.
~Thomas Lux “Refrigerator, 1957”

My childhood refrigerator also contained a jar of maraschino cherries. They were used only once a year, at Thanksgiving, when my mother would pull the jar out from the depths of the fridge, twist open the top and pull out four bright red cherries.

A sweet potato dish would be warming in the oven, covered by large melting marshmallows placed in the center of a ring of canned pineapple. Mom arranged the cherries, cut in half, on top of each marshmallow and replaced the dish in the oven, until the meal was ready to serve.

That was it. We never saw the cherries again for another year.

Sweet potatoes taste wonderful, all on their own, without a dressing of marshmallows and pineapples. But the special holiday tradition was set. In some magical way, the cherries dressed the dish up to help make a tense family gathering a bit jollier.

I do still have my own jar of maraschino cherries in my refrigerator. I forget why. It doesn’t have anything to do with sweet potatoes which I like to serve up plain for Sunday dinners. I possibly bought the jar out of nostalgia, or perhaps because I think every refrigerator needs a jar of maraschino cherries — kind of like the open box of baking soda that sits in most fridges to keep the odors under control.

Regardless, when I spy the jar every once in a while when rummaging in the fridge for something else, it stops time for a moment of remembrance and sadness. After all, I don’t replicate my mom’s mid-century cooking efforts of many-colored jello salads, bread-crumb-topped casseroles and… maraschino marshmallow sweet potatoes.

Even so, a daughter’s love for her mama remains irreplaceable.

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I Was All Hers

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When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.
~Seamus Heaney “Clearances -3”

April 2008 – Vigil at Mom’s Bedside

Lying still, your mouth gapes open as
I wonder if you breathe your last.
Your hair a white cloud
Your skin baby soft
No washing, digging, planting gardens, peeling potatoes,
Or raising children
Anymore.

Where do your dreams take you?
At times you wake in your childhood home of
Rolling wheat fields, boundless days of freedom.
Other naps take you to your student and teaching days
Grammar and drama, speech and essays.
Yesterday you were a young mother again
Juggling babies, farm and your wistful dreams.

Today you looked about your empty nest
Disguised as hospital bed,
Wondering aloud about
Children grown, flown.
You still control through worry
and tell me:
Travel safely
Get a good night’s sleep
Take time to eat
Call me when you get there

I dress you as you dressed me
I clean you as you cleaned me
I love you as you loved me
You try my patience as I tried yours.
I wonder if I have the strength to
Mother my mother
For as long as she needs.

When I tell you the truth
Your brow furrows as it used to do
When I disappointed you~
This cannot be
A bed in a room in a sterile place
Waiting for death
Waiting for heaven
Waiting

And I tell you:
Travel safely
Eat, please eat
Sleep well
Call me when you get there.

______________

Now that I am a grandmother, I seek those tiny, daily, apparently meaningless opportunities to create memories that my grandchildren may warmly recall decades from now, knowing they were all mine, if only for a few minutes at the kitchen sink.

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Been Gone So Long

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Just a piano playing plainly, not even for long,
and yet I suddenly think of fields of timothy
and how a cow and I once studied each other over a fence
while the car ticked and cooled behind me.
When I turned around I was surprised that it had not
sprouted tall grass from its hood, I had been gone
so long. Time passes in crooked ways in some tales,
and though the cow and I were relatively young
when we started our watching, we looked
a bit younger when I left. The cow had downed a good
steady meal and was full of milk for the barn.
I drove away convinced of nothing I had been
so sure of before, with arms full of splinters
from leaning on the fence. There was no music—
I was not even humming—but just now the piano
played the exact sound of that drive.
~Annie Lighthart “The Sound of It” from Iron String.

Our brains remember the past in odd ways – from a smell, a sound, a bit of music, a taste - it is as if we are teleported to another place.

Senses can distort time passage and slant the present moment:
Smelling cinnamon, I find myself in my grandmother’s kitchen with her apple pie.
Hearing the sad “cooing” of mourning doves, I’m waking up in my cousins’ farmhouse during a summer visit in the Palouse.
Listening to Joni Mitchell’s “River,” I’m deep in thick books in my study carrel at the library, melancholy and wishing myself to be anywhere else.

As our children were growing up on this farm, I wanted to intentionally “imprint” home on them in similar ways, with familiar smells and tastes and sounds, hoping they would mentally find their way back in myriad ways over the course of their lives. Now I find myself wanting to create the same brain memories for our visiting grandchildren. Perhaps this is why I invite them out to the barn with me as I clean stalls and throw hay and fill water buckets. I want them to never forget the smells and sounds and feelings of taking care of animals dependent on our care.

Which reminds me of long-ago sensations when I was four years old:
sitting on top of a bony Guernsey cow’s back as she chewed her grain,
listening to the shush shush shush of milk being squirted into a metal bucket as my dad milked her, the rich smell of the warm milk froth,
clucking hens searching the barn floor for dropped pieces of corn.

Every day, there is so much to see, to smell, to hear, to taste, to feel – all of which is worthy of space in our brain. I have been gone so long, thinking how much I’ve forgotten, yet it just takes a trick of time and sensation to bring it back and experience it anew.

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Gathered Here Together

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Dearly.
How was it used?
Dearly beloved.
Dearly beloved, we are gathered.
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here
in this forgotten photo album
I came upon recently.

Dearly beloved, gathered here together
in this closed drawer,
fading now, I miss you.
I miss the missing, those who left earlier.
I miss even those who are still here.
I miss you all dearly.
Dearly do I sorrow for you.

Sorrow: that’s another word
you don’t hear much anymore.
I sorrow dearly.
~Margaret Atwood from “Dearly”

All day we packed boxes.
We read birth and death certificates.
The yellowed telegrams that announced
our births, the cards of congratulations
and condolences, the deeds and debts,
love letters, valentines with a heart
ripped out, the obituaries.
We opened the divorce decree,
a terrible document of division and subtraction.
We leafed through scrapbooks:
corsages, matchbooks, programs to the ballet,
racetrack, theater—joy and frivolity
parceled in one volume—
painstakingly arranged, preserved
and pasted with crusted glue.
We sat in the room in which the beloved
had departed. We remembered her yellow hair
and her mind free of paradox.
We sat together side by side
on the empty floor and did not speak.
There were no words
between us other than the essence
of the words from the correspondences,
our inheritance—plain speak,
bereft of poetry.
~Jill Bialosky “The Guardians” from The Players.

This time of year, huge flocks of migrating birds pass noisily overhead, striving together in their united effort to reach home. I envy their shared instinct to gather together with purpose.

Human families can be far more scattered and far less harmonious, yet still plenty noisy.

Through these holiday weeks, I take time to remember those who left this life long ago. It is bittersweet to be all together only in a photo album, with youth and smiles preserved indefinitely.

In a flash of time, three generations have passed: children have had children who now have children. Newlyweds have become grandparents, trying valiantly to fit the shoes of those who came before.

In our own eventual leave-taking, we will become the missing to be missed. There will come along new generations – those we will never meet – who will turn the pages of photograph albums and writings and wonder aloud about these unknown people from whom they descend.

Dearly beloved,
we who are missing are right here,
waiting in a drawer or a file or a book on the shelf,
ready to share, in plain words bereft of poetry,
all our love and hopes and sorrows for you,
the future generations to come.

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The Bitterness and Waste of War

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When you go home tell them of us and say –
“For your tomorrow we gave our today”
~John Maxwell Edmonds from “The Kohima Epitaph” 

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
~Lawrence Binyon from “For the Fallen” (1914)

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
~LtCol (Dr.) John McCrae from “In Flanders Fields”

November pierces with its bleak remembrance
Of all the bitterness and waste of war.
Our silence tries but fails to make a semblance
Of that lost peace they thought worth fighting for.
Our silence seethes instead with wraiths and whispers,
And all the restless rumour of new wars,
The shells are falling all around our vespers,
No moment is unscarred, there is no pause,
In every instant bloodied innocence
Falls to the weary earth ,and whilst we stand
Quiescence ends again in acquiescence,
And Abel’s blood still cries in every land
One silence only might redeem that blood
Only the silence of a dying God.
~Malcolm Guite “Silence: a Sonnet for Remembrance Day”

To our military veterans here and abroad –
in deep appreciation and gratitude–
for the freedoms you have defended on behalf of us all:

No one is left untouched and unscarred in the bitterness of war.

My father was one of the fortunate ones who came home, returning to a quiet farm life after three years serving in the Pacific with the Marines Corp from 1942 to 1945.  Hundreds of thousands of his colleagues didn’t come home, dying on beaches and battlefields.  Tens of thousands more came home forever marked, through physical or psychological injury, by the experience of war and witness of death and mayhem all around them.

No matter how one views wars our nation has fought and may be obligated to fight in the future, we must support and care for the men and women who have made, on our behalf, the commitment and sacrifice to be on the front line for freedom’s sake.

Even our God died so we could stop fighting each other (and Him). What a waste we have not stopped to listen and understand His sacrifice enough to finally lay down our weapons against one another forever.

Support for wounded veterans:

Disabled American Veterans

Disabled Veterans National Foundation

Wounded Warrior Project

The Whole Dream

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I am a feather on the bright sky

I am the blue horse that runs in the plain

I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water

I am the shadow that follows a child

I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows

I am an eagle playing with the wind

I am a cluster of bright beads

I am the farthest star

I am the cold of dawn

I am the roaring of the rain

I am the glitter on the crust of the snow

I am the long track of the moon in a lake

I am a flame of four colors

I am a deer standing away in the dusk

I am a field of sumac and the pomme blanche

I am an angle of geese in the winter sky

I am the hunger of a young wolf

I am the whole dream of these things
You see, I am alive, I am alive

I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful
You see, I am alive, I am alive
~N.Scott Momaday from “The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee” from In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems

I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.
~N. Scott Momaday

If I am brutally honest with myself, one of my worst fears is to have lived on this earth for a few decades and then pass away forgotten, inconsequential, having left behind no legacy of significance whatsoever. I know it is self-absorbed to feel the need to leave a mark, but my search for purpose and meaning lasting beyond my time here provides new momentum for each day.

The forgetting can happen so fast. Most people know very little about their great great grandparents, if they even know their names. A mere four generations, a century, renders us dust, not just in flesh, but in memory as well. There may be a yellowed photograph in a box somewhere, perhaps a tattered postcard or letter written in elegant script, but the essence of who this person was is long lost and forgotten. We owe it to our descendants to write down or record the stories about who we were while we lived on this earth. We need to share why we lived, for whom we lived, for what we lived.

I suspect however, unless I try every day to record some part of who I am, it will be no different with me and those who come after me.  Whether or not we are remembered by great great grandchildren or become part of the dreams of creatures in the depths of the seas:
we came from dust and will return to dust-
there is no changing that.

Good thing this is not our only home.  
Good thing we are created to be more than memory and dreams. 
Good thing there is an eternity that transcends good works
or long memories or legacies left behind. 
Good thing we are loved that much and always will be,
Forever and ever, Amen.

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A Solitary Maple

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When I visited as a boy, too young for chores,
a pair of maples flared before the farmhouse.
My grandfather made me a swing, dangling
rope from stout branches. I hurtled
between them high as I could, pumping
out half the day while my mind daydreamed
the joy of no school, no camp, no blocks
of other children fighting childhood’s wars.
With the old people I listened to radio news
of Japanese in Nanking, Madrid on fire,
Hitler’s brownshirts heiling. The hurricane
of 1938 ripped down the older maple.

When I was twelve and could work the fields,
my grandfather and I, with Riley the horse,
took four days to clear the acres of hay
from the fields on both sides of the house.
With a scythe I trimmed the uncut grass
around boulders and trees, by stone walls,
and raked every blade to one of Riley’s piles.
My grandfather pitched hay onto the wagon
where I climbed to load it, fitting it tight.
We left the fields behind as neat as lawns.
When I moved back to the house at forty,
a neighbor’s machine took alfalfa down
in an afternoon. Next morning, engines
with huge claws grappled round green bales
onto trucks, leaving loose hay scattered
and grass standing at the field’s margin.

A solitary maple still rises. Seventy years
after my grandfather hung the swing,
maple branches snap from the old tree.
I tear out dead limbs for next year’s sake,
fearing the wind and ice storms of winter,
fearing broken trees, cities, and hipbones.
~Donald Hall “Maples” from The Back Chamber.

Photo of Aaron Janicki haying with his Oberlander team in Skagit County courtesy of Tayler Rae
Benjamin Janicki of Sedro Woolley raking hay with his team of Oberlanders

I sit with braided fingers   
and closed eyes
in a span of late sunlight.   
The spokes are closing.

It is fall: warm milk of light,   
though from an aging breast.   
I do not mean to pray.   
The posture for thanks or   
supplication is the same   
as for weariness or relief.   
But I am glad for the luck   
of light. Surely it is godly,   
that it makes all things
begin, and appear, and become   
actual to each other.

Light that’s sucked into   
the eye, warming the brain   
with wires of color.
Light that hatched life
out of the cold egg of earth.
~May Swenson from “October”

portrait of Dan’s mom, Emma Gibson, praying, by granddaughter Sara Larsen

I know all too well that by this time in October, the light is changing, the colors have faded, and the chill sets in. I grasp for memories of Octobers past and bundle up the scenes I can preserve now, like harvesting hay to be tied up in bales and stored safely until the middle of winter. 

Then, at the right time, when I’m most hungry for color and light,  when I’m most worried about what lies in store for us in the future, I loosen the strings on the memories and let the images tumble out, feeding me like mother’s milk.

And grateful, I fill up rather than break into pieces…

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