with thanks to Dr. Stefani Boutelier on Ethical ELA’s #VerseLove today. She writes of the way a title can change the interpretation of a poem, or how it might add layers of metaphor: “I invite you to write a poem where the title helps identify its content, theme, or purpose. The topic and form are up to you–the focus today is on the title.”
I will share my poem’s title at the end.
For Day Fifteen of National Poetry Month
The stories of time before my time I lived them through your telling felt them through your pounding heart breathed them with your young lungs until I wanted to run coughing from the reek of smoke the acrid taste of ash and I think of how you spent your years giving yourself to others despite the ghosts that surely clung as smoke clings to clothing and as I enter the doorway I can hardly breathe for the cloying scent of flowers and there you are on the table ready and waiting in your little box conveniently resting in a little white tote I dare not trust the handles I just wrap my arms around you and carry you against my heart like I did my babies only there’s no car seat needed now
still, I must keep you safe in your new lightness so I strap the seatbelt across us both pondering the measure of a man larger than life so reduced
but I’ve got you, I’ve got you cradled close see now, I’m driving you home sun and shadows flickering over us like old newsreels of liberation
******
Title: What Remains
Dedicated to my father-in-law, a World War II veteran.
with thanks to Andy Schoenborn for the invitation to write on “what we have taken and what has been taken from us” in today’s #VerseLove on Ethical ELA – a reflective poem using the words take and taken.
A double etheree, on Day Thirteen of National Poetry Month
New morning brimming with yet unwritten possibility asking nothing of me only offering itself for the things I shall make of it once the ribbon of light releases this present day; what shall I take of it?
This present day, what I shall take of it? Maybe just isolated fragments to hold in pockets of silence little treasures worth saving moments of loving like the ones yesterday has not taken away from you and me.
with thanks to Barb Edler who posted the prompt for #VerseLove on Ethical ELA: “Consider the challenges you’ve overcome, the celebrations you can rejoice, the way you may miss something that you never realized you missed”…as inspiration for a “things I didn”t know I loved” poem.
When I returned to college later in life, after having had a family, I was asked to write an essay on “My Most Memorable Teacher.” I’d never thought about this before and was unprepared to write on the teacher who came immediately to mind…but I did write.
I had to.
On Day Nine of National Poetry Month, I give it to you in poem form.
For Mrs. Cooley
You terrified me, you know looming large an immovable mountain in pearls and heels casting your dark shadow over my fourth-grade days
The topography of your years etched deep on your face your eagle eyes piercing my very existence
The fear and trembling of math drills— Dear Lord save me from subtraction!— I look up and there it is in your expression: You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip
I did not know that many years later when I’d be asked to write of my most memorable teacher that you’d spring to mind clear as day overshadowing all others
and that what I’d recall is how you read Charlotte’s Web to the class
I did not know I could love a spider so
and then how you read us Old Yeller
My God my God I almost died with that dog
I did not know that you were the one who made me love reading for there is a difference in being able to and it being the air you breathe
I could not believe how worried you were when I fell on the playground that day how you cradled my distorted left arm all the way to the office and waited with me ‘til Daddy came
I never dreamed you’d come see me at home when I had to stay in bed propped with pillows ice bag on my cast
I saw you and the tears came— I am missing the last two weeks of school I won’t pass the fourth grade
I did not know you could CHUCKLE that your sharp blue eyes could go so soft and watery and I never heard that phrase before: flying colors you pass with flying colors
Would you believe I am a teacher now it isn’t what I planned but here I am
I never knew until Daddy told me years ago that you’d passed how much I’d long to see you again to ask you a thousand things maybe even to laugh
but more than anything to thank you with all my heart
so I do that now in hopes that you and Charlotte and Old Yeller know that my love lives on
Photo: Girl reading. Pedro Ribeiro Simðes. CC BY – reminds me of young me
*******
Thanks also to Tabatha Yeatts for hosting the Poetry Friday Roundup
Yesterday on Ethical ELA, host Kim Johnson invited poets to write mirror poems: “Find a poet whose work inspires you and write a mirror poem of your own by taking a root from a poet’s work and allowing it to breathe life into your own inspired creation. This may be in the form of a borrowed line, a repeating line, a section or stanza, or an entire poem…”
There are a couple of breathtaking lines I love at the end of Billy Collins’ poem, “Tuesday, June 4th, 1991” – he is writing about dawn coming and “offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.”
For Day Eight of National Poetry Month, here’s my mirror of those last five words, in the form of a pantoum:
To My Granddaughter, Age 5 (with love from Franna)
a small cup of light scooped from ocean waves my sparkling little love dancing through my days
scooped from ocean waves my giggling water sprite dancing though my days now such a sleepy sight
my giggling water sprite goodnight, goodnight now such a sleepy sight to me you are, you are
goodnight, goodnight my sparkling little love to me you are, you are a small cup of light
The acrostic is an ancient poetic form, appearing in Scripture and as prayers in medieval literature. On Day Five of National Poetry Month, I use it to announce a family celebration…with a little wordplay…
Although I planned to resume writing of Easter’s Bounty in the nest on the front door wreath, Unprecedented number of little blue eggs—five!— Now, instead, I ask you to picture my family Doing a bun dance over the holiday, At least in our hearts, at this New-life announcement on Cookies and a special T-shirt: Expecting! —Exponential Easter joy!
First, the finch eggs in the nest on the front door. The fifth egg appeared this morning. We usually get three or four.Abundance!
Now for the cookies: My daughter-in-law and granddaughter made them to announce the special news to my husband and me over Easter weekend …aBUNdance!
My granddaughter’s face was radiant, delivering those cookies at our family dinner. In this photo she is crying on first hearing the news. She threw herself into my son’s arms. The desire of her little heart, granted; abundant joy.
Next-to-the last day of March. Early morning. Still dark. Chilly.
I sit at my laptop, sipping coffee, catching up on my Slice of Life blog comments. The neighborhood rooster across the street crows for all he’s worth.
My husband comes into the kitchen: “Is she up yet?” he whispers.
He means our granddaughter. She spent the night. We stayed up way late watching Frozen II (again). We watched her dancing to the ending credits soundtrack, performing her own astoundingly artistic interpretation, cheeks pink, blue eyes glowing…followed by punchy laughter before the crashing.
“Not yet,” I whisper back. He retreats to his study to work on sermons.
Shortly, though, she here she comes, a gift of the dawn, Aurora’s child, barefoot in a blue flannel gown, cloaked in long, disheveled hair, ethereal smile of joy illuminating the semi-dark kitchen. Favorite lines of a Billy Collins poem come to life:
But tomorrow dawn will come the way I picture her,
barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor. She will look in at me with her thin arms extended, offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.
My radiant dawn-child climbs into my lap. I let her read my post about Dennis the dachshund and his toy moose. At five, she reads with exactly the right inflection in exactly the right places, decoding beyootiful without batting an eye.
“That rascally Dennis!” She laughs aloud.
My husband returns, his own face alight at sight of her. “There she is!” he exclaims. “I’ve been waiting for you, Sugar Magnolia.”
He sings the opening line of the Grateful Dead song:
Sugar Magnolia blossom’s blooming…
Just so happens that our granddaughter’s middle name is Magnolia. A nod to her Louisiana heritage. A native tree here in North Carolina, too.
I think how, less than two years ago, my husband wasdead, until EMS and CPR brought him back. I think of all he’d have missed…
What matters is that we’re here together now, today, in this moment. The Grateful Alive.
Sugar Magnolia, in one of Grandpa’s hats
When we are dressed for the day, she asks: “Can I pick out your earrings? And your necklace?”
“Certainly.”
She picks the magnolia. She and my son gave it to me for my birthday last year.
She hands me the necklace, watches me clasp it, smiles with satisfaction.
She will look in at me with her thin arms extended, offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light…
Just beyond the bedroom door, from the windows in the foyer, birdsong.
The finches.
I waited for them all of March, in vain. Then, here at the very end, within the space of these last twenty-four hours, a nearly-complete nest rests on my front door wreath. More on this tomorrow, when I write with the Spiritual Journey gathering on the first Thursday in April…for now all that needs to be said is that the finches always come to my door, every year except this last one. They vanished without warning, without a trace, during COVID-19. Now they’re back, making their home in the wreath.
The magnolia wreath.
Front door wreath and nest-in-progress
Magnolias, magnolias, everywhere…
They are tougher than they look. The oldest flowering plants on Earth. A symbol of love, longevity, perseverance, endurance.
It’s that word that captures me: Endurance.
It is the end of March.
We’ve endured the COVID pandemic for a whole year.
We’ve endured the reinvention of life as we knew it, school as we knew it, teaching as we knew it.
My family has endured distance, isolation, individual private battles…and we all get our second round of vaccinations over these next two days.
My husband has endured. He is alive.
My granddaughter has endured. She is the light of our days.
The finches have endured. They have returned to resume nesting.
This is my last post for the Slice of Life Story Challenge; for thirty-one consecutive days, I’ve endured. My writing has endured.
I wrote a lot of memoir in the Challenge, for memories endure. I wrote of a walled garden and roots and the need to get out of the comfort zone; I did that with some of my writing. I think now of my magnolia metaphor and look back at its deep roots in my childhood. Southern heritage. My grandmothers, steel magnolias (although they wouldn’t have thought it of themselves). Women who endured wars, deprivation, unspeakable losses. The stand over the landscape of my life like the old magnolia trees near their homes, their churches. They were the encompassing, protective shadows against the burning sun and sweltering heat, the solid coolness of the earth under my feet, where lie the curious, fuzzy seedpods of my existence, my remembering, my gratitude, my faith. From these branches waft the eternal fragrance of sacrificial love and forgiveness; nothing on God’s Earth smells as sweet.
One final curious image—it persists, so I have to figure out if and how it will fit here: When I was very small, I spent a lot of time with Grandma, Daddy’s mother. She and Granddaddy lived nearby in city apartments until he retired and they moved back home to the country when I was six. In this scene, I am around four, I think:
I am waiting in the hall for Grandma. She’s turning the lights out; we are getting ready to go. She calls my name from another room. I call back: “I am here.” My voice keeps bouncing, off the walls, off the stairs going down, down, down, into the darkness; we have to go through it before we can get to the door and the sidewalks and the sunlight outside.
“Grandma!” I cry. More bouncing voice, hollow, strange.
She’s there in an instant. “What’s the matter?”
“What is that sound?”
“Oh, honey, that’s just your echo.”
She calls out, “Hello”…her voice bounces, just like mine.
“Echoooo…” I call. Echooo-ooo-ooo, says the shadow of my voice, rolling down the stairwell.
And I am no longer scared, because now I know.
What does this have to do with magnolias?
Only that we are on our way to the park, where she would offer me bread to feed the ducks, which would come to eat from my hands, from my little extended arms…and where the magnolias still grow in abundance. The memory is a cup of light I carry with me, just as the echo of her voice remains, just as I find myself echoing her, for we are always echoes of the ones we love most. As blood circulates in our veins, so do remembered light and beloved voices, long past shadows and silence. These are things that endure.
Grandma’s homeplace was named for the dawn, by the way. She’s literally Aurora’s child.
But tomorrow dawn will come the way I picture her…
“Stand right there, honey. Let me get your picture by that tree,” I tell my granddaughter, on our first trip to the park.
It’s a different park. A different tree.
But still, and always, a magnolia.
Our Sugar Magnolia, by “her” tree.
*******
With abiding gratitude to the community at Two Writing Teachers during the annual Slice of Life Story Challenge, which concludes today. It was a joy to write alongside you every day in the month of March. Thank you for every cup of light you offered; I will savor the echo of your voicesfor many days to come.
Friday the 13th of March, 2020, when school dismissed, we had no idea we wouldn’t be returning.
Not to the building.
Not to life as we knew it.
Not to teaching as we knew it.
We left mountains of work undone behind us.
We faced mountains looming before us, the likes of which we’d never seen.
A mountain of my masks
In the maelstrom of so much change, we learned.
We learned we could.
We learned that some things, the important things, never change.
Message from a student on my link
Saturday the 13th of March, 2021: Most of us have had our first vaccination and are getting the second.
We are preparing for all students to return to campus on Monday, except the children of parents who have opted to keep them virtual until June.
Last March 13th, we thought it would only be for a week. Maybe two.
It’s been exactly one year.
Today, March 13th, let us celebrate:
We did enough.
We had enough.
We were enough.
We are enough.
It is enough, knowing our why.
The children. Always our why.
Just sayin’. This was shared via text among my colleagues.
*******
The annual Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers is underway, meaning that I am posting every day in the month of March. This marks my fifth consecutive year and I’m experimenting with an abecedarian approach: On Day 13, I am writing around a word beginning with letter m. Just so happens to coincide with the anniversary.
The cross-stitch Victorian Santa stocking. I figured I could have it ready by the baby’s first Christmas. Such a lovely commemorative heirloom…
I got to work, not realizing how tiny the stitches would be, how difficult linen is to work with, how maddening it was to undo and redo wrong steps. I hadn’t done much cross-stitch before. But I had to keep working. It was a labor of love for my baby.
After he was born, I embroidered his name on the banner over Santa’s head. Christmas was still months away; I had plenty of time.
I didn’t realize that my schedule was no longer my own, that when he slept, I should sleep.
I learned. Quickly.
Christmas came and went, with only half of Santa complete.
Well, my sweet boy’s stocking could be ready by next Christmas. He would not be so babyish then; I would have a little more time to work on this.
I’d never had a toddler before…
It wasn’t finished by the next Christmas. Or the next. We used substitute stockings instead.
Somewhere along the way I finished Santa. I got the the toys stitched. All that remained was Santa’s bag!
A striped bag, with lots of light and dark variations of the same colors for depth and shadows.
It was gorgeous.
It was also my cross-stitch Waterloo. Around that time, my second baby was born.
I folded the linen. I placed it in the craft box as tenderly as a loved one laid to rest in a coffin. With acknowledgment of my abject failure for a eulogy. It was over. There was no point in trying to go on. How could I in good conscience make such a keepsake for one child and not the other, anyway? It wasn’t going to happen. I thought of other people’s beautiful needlework with longing and awe. I mourned how this craft turned out to be so unsustainable for me.
That linen remained buried in that box for years and years… until I came across it one day while looking for something else. I unfolded the cloth bearing Santa and my firstborn’s name. Sadness flooded me. He wasn’t little anymore. He was in his teens. The guide for completing Santa’s bag was missing, somehow misplaced, if I even wanted to attempt it. Could I paint a bag on? Would that look terrible? What if I ruined the linen? Could I cut a little bag from felt or cloth and stitch it on? Why even think about this, now?
That’s when I decided.
He would have his stocking.
I took the linen and the backing to a seamstress (my expertise with real sewing being limited to the reattaching of buttons). “I know this looks weird,” I explained. “I started it for my son before he was born and never got around to finishing. It’s as done as it will ever be. Can you just put the back on, please?”
And so the linen became a stocking, at last.
It’s hung on the mantel every Christmas for a couple of decades now, with those disembodied toys poking out of their invisible bag. I never even finished outlining them, save the teddy bear.
Loose threads, if you will.
Except that every stitch that is there holds tight, for it was placed with utmost care, with the stuff of hopes and dreams. Each one is infused with great love, which never fails, despite imperfections and intentions. Efforts made in love are never wasted. That the picture is incomplete does not mean that the whole is ruined or meaningless. Or that there’s no beauty to be found in it. In fact, I’ve read how there’s something incomplete and fragmentary in all great art since Gothic times, left for the audience to complete (Arnold Hauser). Not so applicable to a cross-stitch Victorian Santa. But maybe an unfinished thing is finished in a way that is different from the picture imagined at the beginning. Maybe it’s a lesson in acceptance.
If nothing else…it certainly makes for interesting conversation.
Inspiration fires the soul Never imagining Candles will burn down so soon On the windowsill of willpower. Maybe I mourn intention Passing away Leaving my imperfections Exposed for all to see. That is when inherent beauty comes to light Even in loose threads, left untied.
*******
The annual Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers is underway, meaning that I am posting every day in the month of March. This marks my fifth consecutive year and I’m experimenting with an abecedarian approach: On Day 9, I am writing around a word beginning with letter i.
For Grandma and Grannie. With all my gratitude and love, always.
They stood beside each other at the hospital’s nursery window on the evening I was born. For one I was the first grandchild. For the other I was the first granddaughter, following five boys. The other stepped back so the one could see me better.
I inherited the middle name of one. I inherited the brown eyes of the other.
One had the name of a red jewel. Ruby. The other had the name of a white flower. Lillie.
One was born the day after Christmas, in the year of the Lusitania sinking. The other was born at Eastertime, in the deadly third wave of Spanish flu.
While a young teen, one lost her father to suicide. While a young teen, the other assisted her midwife mother in delivering babies.
One graduated from high school at sixteen. The other didn’t finish school, but completed home health certification when I was a child. I attended her pinning ceremony.
One was married at twenty. She had three babies in three Octobers across nine years. The other was married at fifteen. She had six babies by the time she was twenty-two.
One outlived two children. The other outlived four.
One’s marriage lasted sixty-two years. The other had three marriages. Although she didn’t believe in divorce, she divorced a violent man. She was widowed twice.
One held me on her lap and read to me. The other let me open all the bottles in her spice rack to inhale the fragrances.
One held me in her arms when I was a baby laboring for breath—rocking, singing, weeping, until my asthma subsided. The other brought 7-Up when I was a schoolchild home sick with stomach flu, vomiting all day.
One learned how to drive under the instruction of her twelve-year-old son (my father). The other learned how to drive in her fifties, as did her daughter (my mother).
One wrote me letters and kept diaries. The other took me shopping when I needed shoes.
One played the piano. I sat beside her, harmonizing on all the old hymns in musty, well-worn books. The other carried only Aigner purses. She bought my first one, as well as my first birthstone ring.
One gave me her prized antique locket. The other gave me her mesmerizing floating opal.
One shielded her fair skin with a straw hat and long sleeves all summer. The other’s olive skin just browned more in the sun.
One lived deep in the country, in a little white house that will forever seem to me a corner of Heaven. The other lived in town, in a big house of mysterious angles and shadows, once nearly destroyed in a fire. Both houses are gone, now.
One could make any flowering thing thrive. In the garden, the orchard, the African violets in her window. So could the other. She resuscitated more than one of my houseplants.
One made the best collards I ever tasted, although the smell while cooking would knock you down. The other made a glorious rum cake for holidays, although that first whiff upon removing the Tupperware lid would knock you down. Both made killer potato salad.
One sent me money to buy an Easter dress every year until I was in my thirties. The other randomly surprised me with things like satin boxes of Valentine chocolates and by coming to my school plays.
One went faithfully to church. So did the other.
One told me I was a good mother and that she was so proud of me. So did the other.
One battled dementia for a short while. The other had open-heart surgery and battled diabetes and dialysis for years.
One died three days shy of her ninety-first birthday, in a nursing home. The other died at eighty-one, in a hospital.
They sat beside each other one summer afternoon long ago, at my wedding. They taught me everything about sacrifice and survival. They walk with me for as long as I live.
Fashioned and faceted, I am who I am because of one and the other.
My grandmothers, Ruby and Lillie, at my wedding.
*******
The annual Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers is underway, meaning that I am posting every day in the month of March. This marks my fifth consecutive year and I’m experimenting with an abecedarian approach: On Day 7, I am writing around a word beginning with letter g. “Grandmothers” came immediately to mind.
lit bits and pieces 