Leaving my home, traveling alone among strangers; being with my dear family and so soon saying good-bye and leaving their welcoming home; returning to my homey spaces; leaving home again (as I am doing today) and becoming absent from my house and garden… A lot of this kind of drama has been mine, this month. I will write more soon about this week’s travels. I have to say, though, that none of my leavetaking has felt as painful as a scorpion!
LEAVETAKING
On the morning they left we said goodbye filled with sadness for the absence to come.
Inside the palanquins on the camels’ backs I saw their faces beautiful as moons behind veils of golden cloth.
Beneath the veils tears crept like scorpions over the fragrant roses of their cheeks.
These scorpions do not harm the cheek they mark. They save their sting for the heart of the sorrowful lover.
-Ibn Jakh (1000 – 1050) Spain Translated by Emilio Garcia Gomez & Cola Franzen
Tivadar Kosztka, Csontvary Fortress With Arabs Riding Camels
A few years ago I shared a link to this poem so that you could read it in its entirety on the Plough website. Today I’m posting the whole of it here. The poet takes us on a short journey through childhood memories, nostalgia, loss and grief, but doesn’t stop there. She shows how we can honor the memory of those we mourn by living out their virtues in our own lives.
With every autumn that we face, the winter of our life is following closer than ever. Darkness stalks, but I believe each of us has at least one match with which we can light our own “bright fires of love and work,” (and for some of us, even wit) and that these can continue broadcasting waves of encouragement indefinitely.
AFTER HELPING MY FATHER RAKE THE LEAVES
First, I took a running leap, and then, half buried in the heap that we’d raked up, I lingered, caught in a cocoon of leaves and thought. I still remember how they smelled, those castoffs autumn winds had felled— both old and fresh, both wild and clean, the sweet decay of summer’s green; and how they looked—small flags half-furled, hot colors from a chilling world. I breathed more deeply for a few enchanted seconds. More leaves flew as Dad watched, leaning on his rake. He must have known what seasons take. Leaves bright as fire broadcast their dark reminder: beauty was a spark that couldn’t last, the freshened breath of autumn air foreshadowed death. But even so, my father grinned and turned his face into the wind. Years later, I’d learn just how brave my father was, and how a wave of chill or doubt could leave him caught in his own grim cocoon of thought. A darkness stalked him, but he lit bright fires of love and work and wit, and faced the wind, and found his way for decades past that autumn day. And now I kindle every flash of memory that warms the ash of loss. I see his profile still, and face my autumns with his will.
After the affair and the moving out, after the destructive revivifying passion, we watched her life quiet
into a new one, her lover more and more on its periphery. She spent many nights alone, happy for the narcosis of the television. When she got cancer she kept it to herself until she couldn’t keep it from anyone. The chemo debilitated and saved her, and one day
her husband asked her to come back — his wife, who after all had only fallen in love as anyone might who hadn’t been in love in a while — and he held her, so different now, so thin, her hair just partially grown back. He held her like a new woman
and what she felt felt almost as good as love had, and each of them called it love because precision didn’t matter anymore. And we who’d been part of it, often rejoicing with one and consoling the other,
we who had seen her truly alive and then merely alive, what could we do but revise our phone book, our hearts, offer a little toast to what goes on.
Slowly, silently, now the moon Walks the night in her silver shoon; This way, and that, she peers, and sees Silver fruit upon silver trees; One by one the casements catch Her beams beneath the silvery thatch; Couched in his kennel, like a log, With paws of silver sleeps the dog; From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep; A harvest mouse goes scampering by, With silver claws, and silver eye; And moveless fish in the water gleam, By silver reeds in a silver stream.
