March 19.24: Coping, but barely

Which hour, which day,

which year would you pawn?

A moment close by,

or a moment long gone?

And if it were gone

would you regretfully weep?

Would subsequent life

collapse in a heap?

Or without that time

would your life stand stronger,

with lighter heart,

healthier, longer?

Would anyone else

want that card from your deck,

or would it languish in dust

amid others’ dreck?

 

This part of the year brings my annual pondering: is Time a sentient being? Does Time KNOW?

Life goes on, we say, but I’m not sure about that. I think Time sometimes stops and enters into us as a deliberate, knowing cycle. We feel it deep down, sometimes only dimly aware, tired in spirit and wondering why. It’s Time. Time is aware even if we’re not.

Others say, “It’s the same for me!” No, it isn’t. The humanness of it might be the same, but no one has lived another’s Time.

 

More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg.

 

October 29.23: Coping, but barely

It rains on the beach,

and all that’s there

is dull and sunless

weeping air.

It mourns in patters

on the sand,

unquiet quiet

neverland.

Suspended out of

life and time,

the sighing ocean

paradigm.

Ceaseless lapping,

driven sameness,

foaming quest

for something nameless.

Seeking the children,

to tickle their toes,

to cool off their tummies

and squish up their clothes.

Seeking the seekers,

whose vision takes wing

horizonward

to unseeable thing.

Children and seekers,

sans harbors, sans lees,

grieved in the emptiness.

We are brought to our knees.

More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg,

and to Buckroe Beach, Virginia,

for this portrait of loss. The empty beach speaks eloquently of the empty chair, the empty crib, the empty desk, the ache. Grief as unfathomable as the ocean. How well we kill each other.

July 9.23: Coping, but barely

When a tree holds

shape of the untamed wind,

when its roots hold life

amid soulless rocks,

and,

seeking to touch a cloud,

it rises,

solitary,

unambiguous,

untimid,

certain somehow

in its very self,

should we

— do we dare to —

hold to hope?

 

With thanks to Susan Rushton for this eloquent image.

 

May 28.23: Coping, but barely

When War shatters bodies

and pain attends,

the cloth of life

forever rends.

Those who live

don’t want to know

how scythe of War

dealt final blow.

War Death comes also

serpentine,

fanged and poisonous,

cloaked, unseen.

Many there are,

alive in name,

dead by horrors,

never the same.

War breeds Death

of more than one kind:

not just the body,

but spirit,

will,

mind.

Maybe the deadliest

weapon of choice:

words — bloodless shrapnel —

the conscience-less voice.

Or maybe the words

lying fallow, unsaid,

lead to as many

mangled and dead.

How are we humans

to be made again whole

when War amputates

our reason, our soul?

 

It’s Memorial Day weekend in America, dear reader, a time to remember those who have died in service to the ideals of this country, ideals a bit wobbly at the moment. In no way do I trivialize the deaths of men and women whose bodies litter our history and whose families forever bear the pain of death by war, but I can’t help thinking this Memorial Day of all those whose minds and souls died but whose bodies still breathed. POWs, MIAs, and those who returned with invisible gangrene. We are butchering each other still, and this Memorial Day seems sadly weighted with futility.

The dedication pictured above is from the book “Family Separation and Reunion: Families of Prisoners of War and Servicemen Missing in Action,” a compilation of essays by medical professionals involved in establishing care after Viet Nam. One of those was written by our intrepid photographer, S.W. Berg, CAPT, MC, USN (Ret).

It seems to me that this dedication is appropriate for all the families who ache because of war death.

 

May 21.23: Thursday Doors Writing Challenge #3

It was a lovely August day, and the house was open. Through the kitchen window, I could hear the voices outside where Dad was talking to a neighbor. Dad was 83, but he sounded 20, self-assured and energetic in his conversation. No fumbling for words or any other signs that he was making it up as he went along.

Then he came in and asked me where the bathroom was. He’d lived in that house for over 50 years.

The Black Thing filled the doorway on his way to the bathroom; Dad walked through it. It was always in a doorway, a wanton living sentient void, to remind me there was no way out.  There was no food that didn’t taste like the blackness, no sunshine that wasn’t tainted by it, no voice that wasn’t hollowed by it. Its very silence was discordant.

I made dinner earlier to get food in dad before the Black Thing took him. It curled Dad over his dinner plate, forced him to strip his bed and stuff the pillows in his desk, forced him to dig tablecloths out of the old buffet and arrange them, bedlike, on the dining room floor, forced him to walk and walk and walk and walk. Night after night after night.

It covered Dad’s eyes with nightmares so Dad wouldn’t know where he was, wouldn’t know me, wouldn’t know himself. Walking, walking, driven by the Black Thing. Dad’s face wore the dying. Walking, walking, frail, frightened, angry.

When the anguished nights gave way to exhausted day, the Black Thing resumed its vigil in doorways. Like a bat to a cave. Goading me. Dad knew nothing of the nights, of the faceless thing that made even the humanity of tears impossible.

 

Submitted to Dan Antion’s

Thursday Doors Writing Challenge

with thanks to him for hosting,

and with thanks to Teagan R. Geneviene for the photo.

April 17.23: Coping, but barely

I’m old.

I sag.

I forget.

I miss thinking

that I know what’s going on.

But I have a lilac in my house.

I fear the lies

and the liars,

the bullets,

dependence.

But I have a lilac in my house.

I feel the weight of memories,

of words

spoken and unspoken,

of being human,

of mail from funeral homes.

But I have a lilac in my house.

I know the distance

between my grandchildren and me,

the chasm of time,

each day

wider,

deeper.

But I have a lilac in my house.

I remember other lilacs

clutched with bowed tulips,

wrapped in wet kleenex and foil,

bounced with us on the school bus,

their tattered remnants

proudly presented to Sister

for the May altar.

Imperfect days, to be sure,

but days with a lifetime ahead,

not behind.

Much to treasure,

much to trash

from those days.

Still the lilac blooms in my house.

If I go very close,

and breathe it in,

I change somehow.

So brief that air

yet so forever.

 

 

March 29.23: Coping, but barely

If emptiness,

then what?

No footprints

for the waves to play with,

no castles to scoop.

What dies

with the people?

What is left?

Who will walk in the rain,

run from the thunder,

who will there be

to ask,

to answer,

to learn,

to teach,

to wonder at the horizon,

dreaming other castles

on a blue swing?

 

More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg.

I think, dear reader, we turn to our blogs for gentleness and respite. We want something to smile about and hope about. Sometimes, however, we have to write about what is. To this writer, in this country, it’s grief and a near-despair.

November 29.22: Coping, but barely

January 1983 was a low point in my life. I turned 40 and was starting over. I took a deep breath, went back to grad school, got an assistantship, and was assigned a cubicle.

My cubicle mate had different hours and we started leaving notes for each other. Give an English major a scrap of lined paper and stand back. Thus began our friendship.

A few years later, she developed a brain tumor which was initially misdiagnosed. It was a terrible fight she fought, but she survived. Not only that, but she earned her PhD at the same time.

That was Sandy. Sandra Littleton Uetz.

Almost thirty years later came the second tumor. She fought again but this time it was different.

I have lost a dear friend.

I don’t think I’m the only one who wonders.  When, at some low point in life, we find ourselves sharing a desk with a stranger who becomes a dear friend, what is that? Do we call it the grace of God, the luck of the Irish, random chance, some cosmic plan, serendipity?

And when the dear friend is at her low point, and we can’t do anything, what do we call it?

She had great teaching ideas, baked a mean cherry pie, was seriously conversant with Pogo and Krazy Kat and Mark Twain, collected buttons and handkerchiefs, loved books, the St. Louis Cardinals, cats, little dogs, birds, and, most deeply, her family. She was a woman of faith and fear — to live with the possibility of recurring tumors is to be just that.

One December Sandy and I drove to Valparaiso, where the square around the old courthouse had been developed into little shops. Christmas carols — REAL Christmas carols — were piped outside. We wallowed in happy nostalgia. It was one of our best hobnobbings. I promise to remember it.

One of her favorite poems, and perhaps her most favorite, is this, by Robert Frost:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

 

May the angels lead you, Sandy.

 

 

April 30.22: Coping, but barely

Where are the toes

with which we hold

when we reach, teetering,

for the tender goaled?

When life twangs

our bearings like rubber band

and we, poor spitballs,

clawless in foot and hand,

hover on the verge of shot

yet, refusing to be denied,

become the squirrel,

wind and gravity defied,

and clutch that feeble twig,

how do we dare?

Does the soul have claws

that hold us there?

 

 

It seems appropriate, dear reader, to end Poetry Month with a question since I always start it with a question: what is poetry? Still scratching my head on that one.

March 4.22: Coping, but barely

In fear of growing numb,

I plant my mute despair

in shades of blue and yellow

in still late winter air.

It’s just a little corner,

a nearly hidden space,

but wordless grief and anger

have a rightful place.

 

Saluting the immeasurable courage of the people of Ukraine.