Dear blog/relatives, While Arthur's piece on my mother, (Ibby, Aunt Ibby, Granny, etc) was terrific, I also wrote a poem about the burial I thought I could share with you all. I wrote it as part of a poetry workshop and after my submission to the Sharks Mouth. Here it goes.
The Burial
We buried her remains in with the soil
of a new young quince with brittle branches and orange buds,
far above the blue-green sea
and the hard granite New England shore,
where gulls and breaking waves flashed white in the sun,
on a hot July day
one hundred years, two months, and seven days
after her birth in our grandparents’ house
on a nearby hillside.
Here in a small cardboard box were
ashes and tiny pieces of bone,
gritty, easy to sift through our fingers,
all that was left from her past
as daughter, sister, mother, and grand and great of these,
as writer and community activist,
a human creator who always knew what was right to do,
an always engaged participant in a century of life and time.
We mixed her remains in the soil,
where her ancestors dug out the rocks
for the stone walls of their farms centuries ago,
the soil above the sea where her great grandfathers captained
the ships of the new nation,
with the gleaming city on the southern horizon;
in the soil above the never-ceasing to and fro of the waves below,
the constant refrain to all her world,
into the soil to become part
of the bedrock of all her existence, past, now, and hence.
We watered the quince before walking away.
© Charles H. Halsted, January 2008
The Burial
We buried her remains in with the soil
of a new young quince with brittle branches and orange buds,
far above the blue-green sea
and the hard granite New England shore,
where gulls and breaking waves flashed white in the sun,
on a hot July day
one hundred years, two months, and seven days
after her birth in our grandparents’ house
on a nearby hillside.
Here in a small cardboard box were
ashes and tiny pieces of bone,
gritty, easy to sift through our fingers,
all that was left from her past
as daughter, sister, mother, and grand and great of these,
as writer and community activist,
a human creator who always knew what was right to do,
an always engaged participant in a century of life and time.
We mixed her remains in the soil,
where her ancestors dug out the rocks
for the stone walls of their farms centuries ago,
the soil above the sea where her great grandfathers captained
the ships of the new nation,
with the gleaming city on the southern horizon;
in the soil above the never-ceasing to and fro of the waves below,
the constant refrain to all her world,
into the soil to become part
of the bedrock of all her existence, past, now, and hence.
We watered the quince before walking away.
© Charles H. Halsted, January 2008
2 comments:
Beautiful. I feel I'm there!
And it goes right along with my fond memory of breakfasts of Ibby's own thick white bread with her own quince jam on it.
Chuck's poem is beautiful. Brought tears to my eyes
and memory of the feel of that dry bone-dust and bits, the driest thing I had ever touched, as I too consigned all that was left of a beloved parent to the Earth.
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