There's a poem of mine up in the current issue of Antiphon (UK)...
I did not begin this poem thinking of anyone in particular, but was musing about that time in life when people you love begin to vanish into death. But by the end I was dreaming of my friend Melanie Hook Rice, who died at 33 from that terrible enemy, breast cancer, and the image in my mind was, in part, a girl with an urn. Here are some simple facts about Melanie: she was in college and graduate school with me; she studied ballet for most of her life (one of her sisters danced for the Joffrey Ballet); she taught school for some years; she was happily married and the mother of two little children, and lived close to her parents in Gettysburg; and she had begun writing short stories and won an award for one before her death.
The last time I saw her she was dwindled and tiny. We lay on her bed in Gettysburg and told stories and laughed about things past, and her father brought her some okra soup on a tray--she had a few sips and was done. The bright light and life in her was still burning, so close to the end. How brave she was, how merry! I hardly knew how much it meant, back then.
She vanished into eternity many years ago now, but she still recurs to mind. And this is not the first poem into which she has drifted, a beautiful ghost, full of grace and truth.
* * *
Here's a snip to entice:
Girl with Jar
You carry your head high on the stalk of your neck,
as if you were carrying a jar of something precious
(a small Diogenes, perhaps, who slept inside a jar
Hop here for more.
Pleased to see facebook friends Claudia Gary and Janice D. Soderling in the contents...
