Category Archives: poetry

beautiful formations

family, grief, poetry

Thanksgiving, and my children and grandchildren… This morning Kate and her husband “Tom” are arriving at my house, and tomorrow at Pearl’s bunches of us will be together and glad to be so. It will be our first holiday without Papa, Grandpa, without my husband. We will miss him terribly but we will pray in hope of the Resurrection, and be comforted.

I was amazed to run across this poem just this week, in my own ninth month of mourning. Every time I read it I feel more connection with the poet, another woman who has grieved for her husband, and who has more than survived. She captures the sense of wildness in grief, the forces beyond our control, even to the degree that we can’t so much as name them.

I had never thought before about how the places that we find so sublime are the result of winds and raging currents and upheavals that in themselves are often fearsome. It’s a mystery how all of this comes to be, but of course it doesn’t “just happen.” If after endless waves of storms we can behold beauty and feel peace, it’s a work of God.

Mourning, Ninth Month

If I am altering,
trying to intercept my inner targets
with some shift in aim,
lighting the bales with the old moon’s shell
neither meaningful nor purposeful
just looking well,
I’ll change
with some obedience, wishing I could recognize
the force. I don’t know yet if it is thoughtless.
Many beautiful formations on earth
are made without hope, but with winds and rivers
in its stead.
Is my national park
a widow, carved then saved, and a draw
for visitors
whose pity erodes to awe?

–Sandra McPherson

I will not stop here.

death, grief, poetry

PASSAGE

And there was evening, humid
with lightning, when my father

fell to the earth like summer hail,
scattered. I gathered

my mother, we threw in
a handful of pebbles. And

there was morning, bitterly.
There was evening news

bluing walls, violet morning
on thunderheads, and the evening

when morning
would never again light our bodies in bed.

Morning caravans, headlights,
evening. A long caravan of evenings. Then

there was only me, morning. Awake in a room
in a building vast with rooms. Everyone

evening. Everyone morning. And God
had finished all the work he had been doing—

babies, honeybees, spreadsheets, winter
mornings. I said,

I will not stop here, evening. I’ll see you
in the morning.

–Thomas Dooley

Days that glow with butter.

family, food and cooking, poetry, ,

This poet’s experience was not my own, except perhaps during my brief visits to my Grandma, to whom I am forever grateful for not being a buyer or consumer of margarine. I can still see the giant pat of butter that she would lay on top of a baked potato that she had slit and pinched open to receive the gift.

That mystical event of the tiger spinning himself into a pool of butter on the ground was early etched in my memory, too. It’s a food with special powers.

BUTTER

My mother loves butter more than I do,
more than anyone. She pulls chunks off
the stick and eats it plain, explaining
cream spun around into butter! Growing up
we ate turkey cutlets sautéed in lemon
and butter, butter and cheese on green noodles,
butter melting in small pools in the hearts
of Yorkshire puddings, butter better
than gravy staining white rice yellow,
butter glazing corn in slipping squares,
butter the lava in white volcanoes
of hominy grits, butter softening
in a white bowl to be creamed with white
sugar, butter disappearing into
whipped sweet potatoes, with pineapple,
butter melted and curdy to pour
over pancakes, butter licked off the plate
with warm Alaga syrup. When I picture
the good old days I am grinning greasy
with my brother, having watched the tiger
chase his tail and turn to butter. We are
Mumbo and Jumbo’s children despite
historical revision, despite
our parents’ efforts, glowing from the inside
out, one hundred megawatts of butter.

–Elizabeth Alexander

butter art 97 crp