I spent some time this morning scrolling through the pictures in my phone. (Confession: I'm terrible at organizing my photos. It's just one big string of images in chronological order--no neatly-labeled folders for me.) Of course, with each snapshot comes a flood of memories--smells, tastes, sounds. Old friends. New friends Christmases past and present. Loved ones here. Loved ones gone.
Sharon Olds studies a picture . . .
Photograph of the Girl
by: Sharon Olds
the dry pan of Russia, in the drought
of 1921, stunned,
eyes closed, mouth open,
raw hot wind blowing
sand in her face. Hunger and puberty are
taking her together. She leans on a sack,
layers of clothes fluttering in the heat,
the new radius of her arm curved.
She cannot be not beautiful, but she is
starving. Each day she grows thinner, and her bones
grow longer, porous. The caption says
she is going to starve to death that winter
with millions of others. Deep in her body
the ovaries let out her first eggs,
golden as drops of grain.
As Olds' poem demonstrates, a photo can tell a story. A young Russian girl during a famine, her body full of the promise of womanhood. Of course, that promise remains unfulfilled. Instead, she disappears with millions of others during a winter of hunger and starvation.
Tonight, a good friend reached out to me with the news that her younger brother passed today. Of course, she's lost, wandering around her apartment, not really sure what to do with herself. I've been in the same situation a few times, and it takes a while to feel normal again. Because you have to redefine what "normal" is.
My friend lives quite a distance away, so I have no way to physically comfort her. All I can offer are empty words (because all words are empty in the face of such loss) and a conversation about Woody Woodpecker and Marvin the Martian. Nothing is going to replace her longing to hear her brother's voice right now.
Tonight or tomorrow, my friend will probably start scrolling through pictures on her phone or in family albums. It's natural--a way to resurrect someone you've lost. Like the Russian girl Olds raises from the dead after 102 years.
My friend will experience these small Lazarus moments a lot over the next few days/weeks/months. Even years. I still see my dad walking into church on Saturday evenings even though he's been gone since 2018. My sister, Sally, is a constant presence in my life.
Please keep Saint Marty's friend in your thoughts in the coming days. The dead stick with the living for quite a long time.
Today, in The Daily Poet, the prompt was this: On this date in 1929, a document was signed between the U.S. ad Canada, protecting Niagara Falls from construction. Write a poem about something you want to protect. It can be a relationship, a memory, something in nature, or something in or about yourself. If this is a first person poem, allow the speaker to be vulnerable.
Blue Ball
by: Martin Achatz
In the picture, you hold a blue ball
in your jaws, your spaniel ears
golden and long, eyes bright,
expectant, as if you want me
to reach through 20 years, snatch
the ball away, send it bouncing
across the living room floor,
the bell inside its rubber shell
jingling like a harness bell
on a horse at full gallop through
a snowy, Robert Frost woods.
I hold the photo, pinched between
pointer and thumb, as if it's made
of crystal so thin a breath would
shatter it. I can still hear the low
rumble in your chest, feel the steam
of your lungs on my palm. Oh,
old friend, gone these many years,
I wonder if, in your last days,
a squirrel memory of me darted
through the pine trees of your mind,
you wanting to chase it with fury,
the coiled spring of your body
so tight your paws don't even touch
the earth as you run. I hold onto
this hope, this precious blue thing--
somewhere, somehow you're still
running, my voice in your ears, calling
Fetch, boy, fetch!
❤️
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