Author Archives: bonesnsnow

children, fathers, grandchildren, granddaughters, image, lineage, links, love, marriage, photography, poetry

Sunrise and Sunset – the Wheel of Life

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Sunrise and Sunset – the Wheel of Life. The 9th Lineage Poem. So we near the end of this cycle of Lineage Poems. We began with the roots of ancestors gone long before I was born, but embedded in my every cell; visited and said goodbye to both my father and my mother; welcomed the addition of a new line through marriage; and celebrated the advent of a new generation in the birth of my beloved granddaughter. Now, we turn to the inherent cyclical nature embedded in the fabric of the generations.

Last year I buried my only brother Joseph, and shortly thereafter learned that our son and daughter in law are expecting a second child any day now, a boy this time.

A death and a birth, a brother and a grandson

brother Joe with my father, circa 1942
chance

I haven’t met him yet
just been told he’s in transit
waiting, biding his time

in the warm, purple
amniotic dark. our oldest son 
told us that his son is expected 

in the spring. I clearly remember 
the morning my wife’s water broke 
rushing to the hospital, becoming 

a father for the first time 
I called my older brother 
eager to share the news

but he was unimpressed

just last month I spoke
at his funeral, his ashes in a box
at the front of the room

and there it is, one leaving
just as another is beginning
and in between, such drama

and beauty, love and pain
and none of it endures - none of us
endures

I wonder if I’ll still be here
when the son of my son
snaps open his eyes

and screams 
at the shock of squeezing
into this hard cold world

I hope so, though I know 
 in truth there’s no way  
to protect him

nonetheless
I’d dearly love the chance

to die trying
my father, 1915

For more poems about brothers, click here: https://www.momjunction.com/articles/brother-poems_00697143/

And if you’d like to revisit the first in this cycle of Lineage Poems, click here:https://oldbonesnewsnow.com/2022/01/09/a-joyful-noise-root-music-of-the-heartland/

children, fathers, grandchildren, granddaughters, image, lineage, links, love, marriage, photography, poetry

A Joyous Day – Gift of a New Life (8th Lineage Poem)

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A Joyous Day – Gift of a New Life (8th Lineage Poem) Nearly three years ago, this lineage began a new phase with the birth of our granddaughter Sawyer. Honestly, I never expected to care much about grandchildren.

I was wrong!

Born on the cusp of covid, she’s always had a bit of “stranger danger” and, of course, this extended to me – kind of still does. Yet we have our own profoundly goofy relationship founded on funny faces, silly noises and mutual surveillance.

She is brilliant, exceptionally verbal and, of course, beautiful. Her blue eyes are stunning, and her crooked grin is simply beguiling.

(I feel very strongly that it’s not my job to post pictures of her on the internet, but below are two that I feel do preserve her privacy.)

I’ve born witness now to the birth and growth of two sons and a granddaughter, and I still have no idea where these exceptional creatures come from, how their intelligence takes root and blooms.

This is the great mystery and the gift of lineage.

I am forever in love

Sawyer in Sara’s hand, a few hours old

mumuration

her small voice rising 
in the dark above the crib
a morning murmuration beginning
spinning, rising, a flock 
of freshly hatched words 
translucent and damp

where did she come from? 
this spontaneous consciousness 
this ascending double helix 
of intelligence - pulsing, spiraling 
wave upon brilliant wave 
of innate wisdom, elaborating
her sweet song, a spark 

radiating across the endless space
of possibility, coming now
to crack open the darkness like a star 
like the first soft light

of this brand new day

Equally astounding is how quickly a child engages, learns to stand, to walk and to step into a tomorrow of her own.

Sawyer and mom Taylor above Ouray Colorado
hers


after a lifetime 
of insisting on my own importance

here I stand, in the shadows 
watching her

watching her

the clouds roll in
and evening pools in the valley

she takes one step forward
and then another, venturing 

to the very edge of the world 
this world that is now hers 

and hers alone

Here’s a link to more poems about the special creatures that are grandchildren:https://allpoetry.com/poems/about/grandchildren

And here’s a link to the seventh of the Lineage Poems – https://oldbonesnewsnow.com/2022/03/08/shadow-people-when-the-lineage-merges-and-generations-fade/

And a final closing note- young Sawyer’s little brother is due to arrive any day now.

Can’t wait to meet him.

fathers, image, lineage, love, marriage, photography, poetry, www.jfinkimages.com

Shadow People – When the Lineage Merges and Generations Fade

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Shadow People – When the Lineage Merges and Generations Fade. It’s rather easy to look back, to be the receiver and say that “she contributed this, he offered that.” And then children emerge, and very soon you can sense it all begin to flow away, of everything beginning to pass.

When small, there’s a sense of “mine” in one’s children — “my son, my daughter.” But this is a terrible illusion.

In fact, we are theirs.

As Persian Poet Khalil Gibran said in his remarkable poem, “On Children,”

“…their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.” https://poets.org/poem/children-1

But a downstream lineage requires an injection – a partner, a husband, a wife to be inserted into this stream so it can flow onward. And right there begins the obsolescence. Suddenly it’s apparent that you no longer matter quite so much, even it takes time for this to sink in,

that you’re rapidly becoming little more than an old story

someone your child might recall years from now

and, if you’ve been very fortunate,

smile.

And while this is natural, it does bring with it the opportunity to love in a completely different way. This is not the love born of biology, nor is it a love shaped from an accumulated lifetime of shared experiences.

This is a love born of learning, of tolerating (in both directions, of course,) of getting to know, of bumping against each other, of embracing, of creating new shared experiences, and ultimately, heaven willing, of standing together to support the launch of the next generation.

Lineage. True Lineage.

And Gratitude.

the downstream begins

shadow people


they begin as shadow people
two-dimensional, replaceable
appearing only for a moment 
then fading, leaving only a name 
a story to be laughed about 
over dinner 

translucent satellites
in temporary orbit around this child
you’ve birthed and fed, the one
you’ve poured your life into, saw fall 
and stand again, then mature into the rich 

three-dimensional life you see before you 
who one day brings home another 
and suddenly you sense 
that this just might be 

“the one” 

the one that takes root in the rich soil 
of your son, the one he now turns to 
before you, the one who clearly holds all 
of his new secrets, the one who’s ear hears 
all of his dreams

and though you try to be happy for him 
and for “them” 

you can already feel yourself 
beginning to thin, to lighten, to lift 
ever so slightly above the floor 

where they now stand together 

can feel yourself darkening 
and spreading up the long wall 
as the sun drops low in the sky 
stretching the day’s last shadows 

which even now are beginning to fade 
as day inevitably progresses 

into night

In case you missed it, here’s a link to the Sixth Lineage Poem – This Father’s Imperfect Love: https://oldbonesnewsnow.com/2022/03/01/this-fathers-imperfect-love-sixth-lineage-poem/

fathers, love, marriage, photography, poetry, Reflections

This Father’s Imperfect Love – Sixth Lineage Poem

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This Father’s Imperfect Love – Sixth Lineage Poem. Writing an honest poem is a profoundly private act. Making the decision to share that poem publicly is anything but. This is especially true if one is writing “about” a friend or family member who’s still alive to read it (bearing in mind that all we can ever write about is our experience of another person– it’s all we have.)

Looking over my work, it’s clear that some of my poems may never see the light of day. I sort of have a Hippocratic oath about my poems – “first, do no harm.” And I guess there’s the rub – continue to slice close to the bone without causing embarrassment or harm to another.

For example, looking back at the Fifth Lineage Poem (https://oldbonesnewsnow.com/2022/02/14/the-gift-of-an-exquisite-love-the-fifth-lineage-poem-valentines-day/) I know there are several other pieces I might have chosen that to me are very powerful, but that speak to aspects of our relationship that are too personal, too fraught to lob onto social media — sharing the intimacy of personal experience without invading the intimacy of another in the process.

dos hombres, Patrick and Nathan

So, here I turn and begin to look at the Lineage that descends from us rather than comes down to us. When our boys were born, I was so buried in career that there was no room for anything creative. It was only when I finally cried uncle and turned in my travel bag that a lifetime of suppressed creativity began to stir.

Consequently, I don’t have any contemporaneous work that touches on the joy, the mystery and the profound confusion that comes with newborns and the brilliance of little boys.

Instead, here are two pieces I wrote as the guys entered late adolescence, as they began to have a life that was increasingly invisible to their parents, as they left our family home for the world

I can’t protect them, but did I prepare them?

In a profound sense, it’s no longer my affair

fathering

as you pass the salt 
I notice how your mouth 
always tips on the edge of a smile, 
but I’m distracted by the thought 
of screeching tires

and as we talk, your curly hair 
bobs up and down (you know 
I'd like you to cut it – but not really) 
what I really want 

is for you to somehow find a way 
to protect yourself. and while desert 
is being served, I’m preoccupied 

with sheets being pulled over faces 
on a dark road I don’t recognize.

so, I can barely clear away the plates
while maintaining this pleasant conversation
in complete dread, as I am

of a decision you might one day make 
the one I won’t understand

the one I will never, ever understand

They learn to stand as children, then turn to you as men, and then they go.

And there it is.

not so little boys anymore, Nathan and Patrick

for a son


I’ve been waking in the night 
grinding my teeth – some feelings 

are so close to the bone, so fragile 
they can’t support a whole stack of words
 
like my denial that you will be leaving 
in the morning 

like my fear that I 
failed to teach you to fly

For a view of Patrick’s recent passions, here’s a link to his blog, Mountain Lessons- check it out! http://mountainlessons.com/

image, love, marriage, photography, poetry

The Gift of An Exquisite Love – the Fifth Lineage Poem

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The Gift of an Exquisite Love – the Fifth Lineage Poem, on Valentines day no less! We were eighteen years old, in our freshman year of college in a small town in Michigan. I’d borrowed the money from my girlfriend (a long story) to take her out to an old-school, no-alcohol coffee house called “the Troubador” in Kalamazoo Michigan.

The room was full of cigarette smoke, and we were with three other couples, all there to hear a band who’s name I’ve long forgotten. Between sets, we all ordered coffees and the talk was fast and loud. She was seated directly across the large round table from me. Thinking of nothing much at all, I happened to look up and straight into her impossibly large green eyes.

And I was done for. I fell in love in that instant, and have never stopped loving her.

The Gift of an Exquisite Love

A love that I’ve never relinquished. A love that has sustained me now for over forty years.

These poems were written a very long time ago

Each one came as a completed poem

Each was a gift

The Gift of an Exquisite Love

the gift of an exquisite love
those impossible green eyes
I felt myself break


I felt myself break

and drift back
and back, and down

to settle here
forever

on the deep green floor
of your eyes

And the second, once that gifted love had begun to breathe. 

the soft, soft sleep of dawn


I awoke this morning
to the brush your lash
on my neck

like a light
on the still darkened stage
of our bodies held tight 

and heavy and warm
in the soft, soft sleep
of dawn
my Love, my Sara

Link to the first Lineage Poem (the ground):https://oldbonesnewsnow.com/2022/01/09/a-joyful-noise-root-music-of-the-heartland/

Link to the second Lineage Poem (father dying):https://oldbonesnewsnow.com/2022/01/16/on-the-way-to-heaven-2nd-lineage-poem-over-ohio/

Link to the third Lineage Poem (burying my father): https://oldbonesnewsnow.com/2022/01/24/a-father-returns-home-welcomed-by-the-land/

Link to the fourth Lineage Poem (missing a mother):https://oldbonesnewsnow.com/2022/02/01/a-mothers-love-a-sons-regrets-fourth-of-the-lineage-poems/

And a closing link to the incredible Pablo Neruda, Love Sonnet XI:https://hellopoetry.com/poem/9927/love-sonnet-xi/

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A Mother’s Love, a Son’s Regrets – Fourth of the Lineage Poems

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A Mother’s Love, A Son’s Regret. Looking back, it’s clear that I’ve written more about my father than I ever did about my mother. Fathers and sons I suppose. But she was also the quieter, smaller one of the two. I always had the sense that she chose to hold herself close, always to defer.

September 11, 2001

We drove her from Florida to Chicago on September 11, 2001. The world had suddenly erupted in fire and all flights had been cancelled. We convinced Hertz to give us a van and we drove for three days across a silent, empty America. Her dementia was pretty bad by that point, and she repeated over and over and over, “Where am I going?” “Why do I need to go?” I didn’t have a good answer then, and I guess I don’t now.

A Mother’s Love, a Son’s Regrets

Margaret Ruth lived in a nursing home in Chicago from 2001 until her death in 2004 from simple old age. I’ve posted before (link immediately below) about my sadness that I failed to attend properly the end of her life, allowing her to die alone in the night when it was pretty clear that it was her time.

Here’s a link to “That I Would do Better” https://oldbonesnewsnow.com/2020/05/10/that-i-would-do-better-poetry-poem-mother-regrets-mothersday/

Margaret Ruth, age four on the far right, 1921

I own that regret. But there’s also the regret of perhaps never having really known her. So here are two pieces that speak to missing the life of one who loved and raised me. Perhaps I could only see this as I creep into my older years myself. First, the mystery of seeing off one who once had been the entire world.

When the World is Lost Forever

childish things


we stood in a circle around the grave
some read poems while some 
chose silence. the funeral director

placed her ashes in the ground
while the redwing blackbirds sang 
among the corn. we'd always assumed

that she could fly, but then we
were only children, and eager to cling
to childish things

A Mother’s Love, a Son’s Regrets

And second, upon seeing her in the nursing home, a shadow of who she’d once been and wondering if (or perhaps knowing) we’d missed something essential over all those years.

margaret ruth

old woman, what have you done with her?
she was here when I last looked. now 
there's only you, a remnant, your mind 
approaching the capacity of experience 
cycling back upon itself, the tape skipping, catching 
rewinding as we speak. your face has been chiseled, 
deep lines cut into spotted flesh surrounding pools 
of sadness in your eyes. 
                                        
I can see into the depths 
of that water -- here rest the old ones 
in images black and brown, a diminishing succession 
of farmers’ wives standing resolute at the arms 
of sitting dead husbands. here are young brides 
with radical curls, high collars and narrow waists 
holding round-faced war-babies smiling at the camera. 
here is a mother reading soft words to soft children 
in light fading into dreams—ah Margaret Ruth 
we were for each other 
and we never really knew
The author at age one with his Mother Margaret Ruth, 1958

Here’s the link to first Lineage Poem – A Joyful Noise https://oldbonesnewsnow.com/2022/01/09/a-joyful-noise-root-music-of-the-heartland/

Here’s the link to the second Lineage Poem – One the Way to Heaven, Over Ohio https://oldbonesnewsnow.com/2022/01/16/on-the-way-to-heaven-2nd-lineage-poem-over-ohio/

Here’s the link to the third Lineage Poem – Welcomed by the Land, Redwing Blackbirds https://oldbonesnewsnow.com/2022/01/24/a-father-returns-home-welcomed-by-the-land/

For more poems speaking to mothers and motherhood, click here: https://www.poetry.com/psearch/mothers

All Poems, Text and Images are © 2022 jafink/oldbonesnewsnow.com

fathers, image, links, love, photography, Reflections

Welcomed by the Land – A Father Returns Home

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The third in a series of Lineage Poems: Welcomed by the Land- A Father Returns Home. My father left Hancock County Ohio after the war and barely looked back. But when he died in 1986, there was a plot waiting for him there. A farmers’ cemetery tucked among the cornfields, rows of family names eroding into nothing up a small hill. Later, my mother would join him there, but this poem is about his journey home. And the Redwing Blackbirds in the fields, and the ribbon of asphalt leading there. About an Oldsmobile, and the memories of a boy, now a no longer young man.

Click here for the first poem in the Lineage Series: https://oldbonesnewsnow.com/2022/01/09/a-joyful-noise-root-music-of-the-heartland/

Click here for the second poem in the Lineage Series: https://oldbonesnewsnow.com/2022/01/16/on-the-way-to-heaven-2nd-lineage-poem-over-ohio/

photo credit – the Audubon Society https://www.audubon.org/

A Father Returns Home:

redwing blackbirds

redwing blackbirds 
flash like fire in the sun, the Olds 
sailing and sailing over waves of blacktop

clicking past fenceposts, the boy 
peering from the back seat trying to count 
but it’s too fast to keep up 

such a small hole for a man that size 
tough to fit eternity into a space like that 
maybe space like time is collapsed by death

they say at the margin space and time 
are the same thing. tell me, if you could choose 
would you disappear in order to last forever? 

maybe it’s better to spread yourself out 
catch the wind and let it swirl you as ashes
straight to heaven. or maybe get an Olds

hold the jar out the window 
and go sailing over waves of blacktop
pop the cork and stream out the long dusty cloud 

that’s now filling your mirrors as you drive 
catching now on the wind, filling the sky 
until the sun itself goes black 

until the redwing blackbirds 

disappear



© 2022 jafink/oldbonesnewsnow.com

Back to the Earth
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On the Way to Heaven, 2nd Lineage Poem: Over Ohio

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the author with “Big Al” in Detroit in 1963

On the Way to Heaven, 2nd Lineage Poem: Over Ohio My father died of lung cancer in Florida in 1986. Always an angry man, he was supremely bitter about his illness, feeling like he’d been robbed of the retirement due a lifetime of work. At the time, I was buried in my own workaholic haze in Chicago, flying down on weekends to see him, then going straight back to the office when I got back North.

He was in hospice when I got word that the end was near, and was in a coma by the time I arrived. This poem tells the story of a real conversation, one I’ll obviously never forget. He was a hard man who was hard on his boys. As I enter my own older years, I resent the hardness less and less, and miss him more and more. I’d love to be able to talk with him one more time.

Here’s the link to the first Lineage Poem : A Joyful Noise – Root Music of the Heartland—https://oldbonesnewsnow.com/2022/01/09/a-joyful-noise-root-music-of-the-heartland/

Over Ohio

my mother called on Friday
to let me know his time was near
that I needed to come now.

he was not an easy man
either to me or to my brother
or to himself. my mother, 

simple loyal and kind was spared this,
or so I hope. he’d been in a coma 
for days when I went to sit with him

through the night, his cancer-eaten body
rattling its ragged breaths
in the pale blue light of the monitors.

unable to sleep, I watched him breath in
the darkness, then just before dawn
he woke and wanted to talk.

I told him he was dying
as if he didn’t already know.
and he asked me how much money I made 

(so he’d know, he said, if I’d be safe)
then apologized for smacking us boys,
and I told him it was alright

even if it really wasn’t. 
I left when he drifted back into sleep
or wherever it was he’d been waiting,

and caught the early morning 
flight for home. he died 
while I was 30,000 feet over Ohio.

sometimes I wonder – 
at that moment, which one of us
was closest to heaven?

© 2022 jafink/oldbonesnewsnow.com

Big Al on the driveway in Detroit, 1963

And here’s a link to more poems about fathers from the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/101752/poems-about-fathers

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A Joyful Noise- Root Music of the Heartland

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siting on hard pews and harder teachings

The end of the year always turns my thoughts to family, lineage and those who came before. A Joyful Noise- Root Music of the Heartland – the first in a series of “lineage poems,” words of origin and reflection, of receiving and giving. My parents, both born in the earliest part of the twentieth century (1915 and 1917,) met in a no-stoplight farm town in northwest Ohio. Bred of simple stock, firm in their protestant faith, the kind of belief that’s simply assumed, stitched into the fabric of a life.

Root Music

on my days alone, or late
when the day’s light is going 
I can often hear their voices 

the thin black line of the old songs 
wavering like smoke above the fields 
the sad soul songs of simple white churches 
 
I can see old white women, the knotted hands 
of hard lives passed in good work
of cold mornings and long days 

I can see old men bent stiff into their one black suit 
restless children, sitting on hard pews 
and harder teachings

I was raised by voices 
planted in the flat black dirt of Ohio 
the granges and barns of a world expired 

now, when the sun has worn itself out 
and the heat of the land begins to fade
I like to sit and listen as darkness falls 

listen to the birds settling home
listen for the hymns as they begin to rise 
from the land 

listen to my own jagged life 
beginning to round

© 2022 jafink/oldbonesnewsnow.com
the first in a series of “lineage poems,” words of origin and reflection, of receiving and giving

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Final African Wildlife Photography Collection- Zambia 2021

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Third of three collections of African wildlife photos from last October, this time in Zambia along the Lower Zambezi River. A glorious place rich with wildlife and perhaps just a touch less traveled than the Okavango Delta in Botswana.

Click here for the slideshow on jfinkimages.com: https://www.jfinkimages.com/p780763266#hdf04dcf9

Here are the prior two collection links

https://oldbonesnewsnow.com/2021/11/30/new-photo-collection-botswana-2021-part-1/

https://oldbonesnewsnow.com/2021/12/08/african-wildlife-photo-collection-botswana-part-2-okavango-delta