Tag Archives: mother

photography, poetry

that i would do better

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mrfhschool

hand colored high school photo, circa 1933-34.

Margaret Ruth  (Draper) Fink, 1917-2004

 

 

that I would do better

 

how much of my life

would I look to retrace?

not the thousand small decisions

that built to a course

I may have mistaken for true,

nor the loves and the lost loves

and shouldn’t have loved’s,

 

but you whose ears

have now passed beyond hearing,

who made the milk that fed me –

 

that I would do better.

 

if you could only come here and die again,

 

here, where this time I would hold you

as you once held me,

here, where we’d cry over parting

and joy at the end of pain.

here, where I would hold your gaze

as the light sifts from your lovely eyes,

 

and then close your brown eyes

with kisses.

 

© 2020 jafink/oldbonesnewsnow.com

 

 

 

 

 

image, photography, poetry

chilidish things

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 I was walking in a bookstore when the phrase, “we always believed that she could fly” came into my mind, loudly.  That night, a poem arose.  The details are from my mother’s memorial….

 

tombstone, child's grave

detail of weathered tombstone, barnett, VT

 

 

chilidish things 

 

we stood in a circle about the grave

some read poems and some

 

chose silence. the funeral director

placed her ashes into the hole

 

while redwing blackbirds sang

in the fields. we always assumed

 

that she could fly, but then we

were only children, eager to cling

 

to childish things

 

 

 

©jafink/oldbones.newsnow.com

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maybe it began

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Image

 

maybe it began

 

maybe it began as a small room

in a small house, a blue spread

on a bed, a wooden dresser

a window, a rug on a wooden floor.

home, the place of origin, a place

to be from — going out and coming

back and going out again. did

such a place really exist, or did I

need to invent it?  a friend

once told me one sure measure

of happiness is how much of this world

we can willingly accept. I so

want to know the truth, any

truth, to be certain of something

inside this living question of a life.

but it seems there’s no arriving

only leaving, and leaving again

no rising beyond the chaos –

only, if blessed, a rising into. only

an acceptance of this perpetual rain

of phenomenon – falling, then freezing

melting and rising again, and then again

rain, merging into the gathering stream

as it runs headlong down to the sea, rushing

back to the source, rushing

as it always must, toward home.

 

 

 

 

© old bones, new snow/ J.A. Fink 2014