Many years ago, I drafted a poem that I worked on awhile and considered finished. I sent it out a few places, and then realized it wasn’t ready after all. I shelved it for a long while, then revised it, and I like it better now; but I don’t think I will submit it again. It feels like too personal a poem to me, and here’s why: when I felt more satisfied with it, I showed it to my mother (it’s about her). She was quiet for a fairly long time. Then she looked at me and asked, “How did you know this?”

Well, I’d imagined it. Guessed. But I felt floored that maybe I’d found words to say what she couldn’t say, and that she felt I had it right–her experience, I mean, her feelings. And now that feels important to me, because my mother died just a few days ago.

But this blog is sort of personal, after all, and so I am posting it here as a not-quite-finished, imperfect poem that nonetheless said enough to the person I wrote it about. My audience of one, in this case. Which is enough for me, and rare enough in the art of creative writing; and I really cannot come up with words this week given how I feel about my mom’s death. “Still processing,” as they say. Each of us does that differently, and each grief differs depending upon relationship and circumstances.

My mother’s passing was extremely peaceful, calm, accepting, about as uncomplicated as a death can be. Yet I will be holding onto the experience and my feelings about it for a long time to come.

~

Foreignness

1. 1955
Ten years after the war, my newlywed parents
leave a small, Midwestern town.
The lighted ball that marks its one-pump gas station
usurps the moon en route to the city.
At the railroad station, my father sets down luggage
and takes my mother’s hand.
She feels the platform tremble, sees one white
light heading eastward and away.
It takes all the silence out of darkness
as they rattle through tunnels far from home.

2. Marburg
My mother never learns to speak German.
She lives a year without language while my father
pursues his studies, relying on gesture
and interpretation. She holds the hands 
of old women who’ve survived two wars,
the hands of kindergartners too young to recognize
the whining patterns of Allied bombers,
navigating a country suturing itself partially-
whole in the aftermath of its collision
with fascism. It’s a nation spoiled and bleeding.
For my mother, the first year of marriage
is a foreign land my father tries to translate.
She keeps her eyes open, never meets the enemy.

3. Harlem
After Europe, her hometown becomes
a thought she keeps at bay.
In white uniform and cap, she tries to balance
efficiency and compassion in the hospital’s
pediatric ward with its infant rat-bite victims,
steam-burned patients, malnutrition, poverty.
There is so much to learn.
Returning each night to the student apartment
on 122nd Street, she weeps quietly.
Too many reasons, no language to explain them.
The floor trembles as the IRT passes.
Each day wears a hard face.
She can’t put it into words, and my father
cannot interpret for her, not this time.

~

The haibun below is much newer, but also still a draft. And also perhaps not a piece to send out for publication, but rather to share with my readers, some of whom were acquainted with my mother.

Baptism by Sea

She never lived sea-side, the nearest she came was that square white house sixty miles west of the Atlantic. She’d grown up far away amid oceans of corn but loved the shore. She learned sand varies from place to place by walking on Baltic beaches, on Galway’s strands, the coasts—Amalfi, Cyprus, Cairns—Puerto Rico’s wavelets curling over her feet, but she was only ever a visitor, tourist to the locals whose neighbor was the ocean. It never was her familiar though she loved to stand and watch for signs of its vast unity, the way it touches every ragged cove, its calm beneficence in Virgin Gorda’s inlets, the salt clarity of those horizons she could reach but not imagine until she felt Bali’s fine-grained silt underfoot, went clamming near Maine’s slick-sided rocks. As a girl all these were unimaginable. She entered the sea as a woman, and what broke around her body with each wave was tactile, thrilling: an initiation.


between sky and sea
only the distances
shimmering


~

https://www.huffandlakjer.com/obituaries/bonnie-michael