The Glider

Calls her out
Into the night

Anchors the seating
For souls
To search

Stars with wings
The lightening bugs
Of all the things we recall
Are insects in a Mason Jar
Holes punched through to last the night

Conversation
In the crosshairs
We open Pooh and cry at the news
Of loss, our Mia

We go back
And forth
Counting on a change
Then see it was made
After all

The wall art reminds
We live forward
But understand in looking back
Truth proclaimed in pottery
Words lined up and down
In the cross

No idle living
On the porch
If metal spoke
It would tell
Of healing there
Black metal harbinger of hope

A forty dollar yard sale
Piece
Be with you
Found and tossed
Find a seat
Gather
Afresh
Huddle anew

The glider
Guides
Groups
Out under the waxing
Moon

She waxes poetic

Remembering her friend
The one who died too soon

Cancer
Claimed another

Come glide with me
The days are numbered
The phone has rung
And doctors tell of cancer
And the fighting man
Who loves to rock and hold a glass
Always more than half way full
Of hope, spins it good and glorious

Sit and rock
Roll back the rock of death
It lost its sting
And tell me all

We’ll knit one pearl two
And make the days

Count
Don’t drop a stitch
In time
The stitches one by one
Will make a perfect
Covering
Come

And glide
You must not move
Mother may I

Gather on your
Glider
Under our moon
With you

Death has lost its sting
Forty dollars
Buys a lot of living

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

In Which We Grieve While Living

Death both stops you in your tracks and thrusts you onward. Propels you forward, harder, faster, fighting mad that it came at all. Births a new desire to grasp the days like a starving man, deprived of food and all that is good. To savor, taste and see that it is good, so good. The all He makes and made. We  ride the waves of grief, nestle in the glory goodness that it wakes us up to see.

Life is revealed in death. We float in seas of salty remembering. Hold on to each other harder, stronger, longer and buoy a grievous soul in love. Linking arms and planning how to rip the wrapping off the day. Crazy to unwrap the gift.

Awake anew to the mystery of the world. The unknowing of the numbered days. Shot out of a canon,  we declare we will press on in living with our grief and sacred remembering of the lives that end. Ended. Continue on in heavenly glory. Bless and pray and thank and grieve. But live. In a holy place of remembering.

We  weep at life without our loves. People, those who have marked our lives, the lives of a child, importantly. Who have invested, sacrificed and loved us well. Smiled when aching, loved when hurting, played while pushing back their own sorrows. They teach us love while living life. Show us mercy upon mercy. Currents of grace whirl round their brilliant countenances.

And we are changed forever and ever, amen.

And it is then we pull out Pooh. Because it is an anchor with its words on living and mysteries, child-like exploration into unknown forests and chasing after demons disguised as hephalumps. We gather the musty pages which smell of childhood and life. That smell of laughter. And yellow smells wise and knowing. Turn the mustard colored pages where a child has added to  with scribbles of their own. Crayons colored green and red have left their waxy mark of random scribbly scrabbly child’s play.

In my home, Pooh anchors with belly laughs. And memories of the best times. Of silly sayings and pages which read a hundred and leventy leven times ninety sound new and as fresh as a the morning’s first drips from a French Press. The world wakes us up. Turns in circles and cycles seem comforting. As life is supposed to be.

Cycles of life, cycles of death, cycles of grief. And Pooh.

My mother read it to my grandmother in her eighty’s. In the home. And in Latin. And they laughed tears, tracking down aging cheeks in salty rivulets.

And on the morning of more news of death, we pull out Milne and let him take us back to happy youth. Where rabbits and owls and kangaroos talk and donkeys struggle with depression and angsty life views. Where a small pig can be a best friend. Where loss and grief loose a little of their sting in the imaginations of an Englishman, a poet a writer a giver of hope.  Years upon years after his birth and death.

His words, a healing gift.

So we press on a little  more gaily into our day. Looking for honey in the sour sorrow of loss. My mother reads Pooh aloud and the pain diminishes a small amount. Our family gathers around grief.

And around story. Childhood joys. We will pray tonight. And lift up the grieving ones to God. We will bow and lift and whisper and cry.

But for now its words of poetry and children’s lit. At times like this, it is always  words. Of prayer.

And a bear.

*************

photo of A.A. Milne – Wikipedia.org

photo of glide – Elizabeth W. Marshall, poetry and prose through a lens of grace

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