MEMORIAL DAY

[In four days the United States celebrates Memorial Day. You can read about Memorial Day on many websites: how it came into being, and where--lots of conflicting stories about its conception. Today I want to share with you a poem by Michael Anania, American poet.]

MEMORIAL DAY

It is easily forgotten, year to

year, exactly where the plot is,

though the place is entirely familiar—

a willow tree by a curving roadway

sweeping black asphalt with tender leaves;

 

damp grass strewn with flower boxes,

canvas chairs, darkskinned old ladies

circling in draped black crepe family stones,

fingers cramped red at the knuckles, discolored

nails, fresh soil for new plants, old rosaries;

 

such fingers kneading the damp earth gently down

on new roots, black humus caught in grey hair

brushed back, and the single waterfaucet,

birdlike upon its grey pipe stem,

a stream opening at its foot.

 

We know the stories that are told,

by starts and stops, by bent men at strange joy

regarding the precise enactments of their own

gesturing. And among the women there will be

a naming of families, a counting off, an ordering.

 

The morning may be brilliant; the season

is one of brilliances—sunlight through

the fountained willow behind us, its splayed

shadow spreading westward, our shadows westward,

irregular across damp grass, the close-set stones.

 

It may be that since our walk there is faltering,

moving in careful steps around snow-on-the-mountain,

bluebells and zebragrass toward that place

between the willow and the waterfaucet, the way

is lost, that we have no practiced step there,

and walking, our own sway and balance, fails us.

-----

Michael Anania was born in Omaha, NE in 1939.

-----

It was called Decoration Day when I was a little girl. We gathered wild iris and tiger lilies from the ditches that bordered the fields where corn was just beginning to thrust its green shoots through the black Illinois soil. We carried the flowers in quart jars of water to the cemetery where we decorated two small graves of my brothers. I didn't know what it was all about. But I felt the atmosphere of loss and mourning.

Now I know it as a day of remembering the ones who have left us--the Episcopal burial service says it beautifully: "Father of all, we pray to you . . . for all those whom we love but see no longer. Grant to them eternal rest. Let light perpetual shine upon them. May . . . the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen."