An Overwhelming Dignity

My mother was manipulative

And fiercely possessive of her brood.

She tried my patience, cheated me

At checkers but defended me

From all who threatened harm.

I weeded her garden weary and sore

From the hard day at my father's side.

Even at fifteen the body fails

At times from overwork and rest

Gives insufficient time to heal.

Eager for approbation and love

I gave as much as one could give

And then gave more than I could give.

My dad too, tired and worn,

Reaching ever for his dream,

'No child of mine will want for food',

Drove himself and us to work

Almost beyond our capacity

To then come home to weed the fields

Of vegetables and landscape plants..

I recall the beauty of the land

And how he stood by me at dusk

When the last rays paled and night came down

And wept to see such beauty gone.

"Put nails under the hydrangeas

To intensify their blue",

She loved the pale pink peonies

But the dogwood was her favourite

As the cardinal was beloved of her.

She planned her funeral with care

Insisted that she leave 'in style';

Designed the gravestone with two red birds

And a spray of blood-tipped dogwood blooms!

Dying for her was a part of life.

She cried for every hearse that passed

Looking at the black cortege

Through bright red roses arching the door.

She chose pink to be buried in

And a coffin lined with pale blue silk,

But her dying was an act of grace.

She saw so clearly in those hours

When the pain was most unbearable

Death's hunger eating away the cells,

Her being burning in agony.

I had to give her Demerol,

Her sisters were immobilized

By the suffering they saw

As when their beloved mother died,

A Russian with Tatar eyes.

They had called me saying she would not last

More than a day or two if that.

My mother said she would die at home,

No foreign bed or hospital

But in familiar rooms she loved

And lavished with her constant care –

In the living room and nowhere else.

I came to her with a brave smile.

"As I was in the area

I wanted to see you for awhile."

"Baloney" she said, and smiled at me.

How differently our souls depart,

My wife in stillness like a bird

Serenely rising to meet her Lord,

My sister so reluctantly

Exiting the wasted flesh

The death-rattle vibrating

Throughout the whitely sterile room

Death taking her unkindly, too soon

From those whose lives were borne by her.

No words of comfort came to me.

What can we share of experience

Other than silence, soul with soul

Beyond the dogma and the creed,

Her life's belief in a vengeful God

Who offers Heaven yet threatens Hell

To those who go against His will,

Or one who saves those who accept -

The bible's true and only God.

And so I knelt beside her bed

Eschewing platitudes for love,

The little that I know of it.

My father fought until the last,

Asking to see the light once more,

And though the body lingered awhile

He was nearly gone when we arrived.

Now in my sixty-sixth year

These memories return to me

In poems engraved on the stones of earth,

Lives we hardly knew, and souls

Of light we could not see but felt

Perhaps behind the human mask,

An overwhelming dignity.