Poems of Narad

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 "€œ
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.