Undertaking
.
Following me home from church
for Sunday dinner
She sees my cloudy, mute
ancestral brides
In the faux Walmart ornate frames
with acid free mats–
The disintegrating evidence
of lost time
.
That matters too much to me
So that I bring home
Broken clocks,
Dust and dust the porcelain figurine
of a girl feeding a goose,
the story told
by her delicate wrists
and pale oval face,
.
“Your life is colorless,”
She says, retrieving her painting of a log cabin
Framed by a swirling and orange sky
From her car, handing it to me–
.
Tells me she was in Da Nang
In a MASH unit,
Mary of the Pieta
soothing amputees
in her round dark arms;
That she and her Mestizo family
were of Deming, New Mexico
Where I thought only the pastoral Navajo
Wandered the mesas
with their ewes,
stumbling wet lambs at side.
.
I tell her that my own family
Built Albuquerque
That they sequestered Native American
bone shards in the museums
And wrote monographs about Jemez Pueblo.
.
She stops me, round, dark eyes
blazing, tells me that she startled diggers
With her shotgun
When they came to Deming with BIA papers
To exhume the burial mounds:
“I’ll come to your cemetery
and dig up your dead,” she says she warned,
firing over their heads.
.
Later, not ready
for more thrust and parry
or a sky on fire
On the walls of my home
I hide the painting away,
Join her in the St. Luke’s nave
To perform the Rutter Requiem
.
We process to the altar;
“Agnus Dei,” we sing,
lifting our voices
in dust-filled light–
.
From the watery shadows
watching a baptism,
we whisper “Libera me Domine,”
Host dissolving
at the back of our throats.
She tells me that she startled diggers
With her shotgun …
I came home from church and found your inspiring words. There is more concern for need and justice in your poem than in all the words I heard this morning.
Gerry
thank you, Gerry! xj
Seconding Gerry.
Wonderful. And how you conclude the poem is perfect.
P.S. I tweeted this.
From the tweet feeds:
“Jenne is fantastic”
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Thanks a bunch Maureen! xxxj
Awesome share! Thank you very much