January 3: Burial, Naomi Shihab Nye, "Burning the Old Year"

In a couple of hours, my wife and I will be driving out to the cemetery for the burial ceremony of her grandmother.  It will be the end of a long journey that began exactly one week ago, in the old year.  Now, we will begin the new year with a letting go.  It will be cold and white and beautiful with a fresh layer of snow.

This week, I am going to include poems about the New Year by poets who I admire and love.  The first comes from Naomi Shihab Nye.  It's all about losses and leavings.  Appropriate for this afternoon's gathering.

Saint Marty wishes everybody a prosperous New Year, filled with more hopes than regrets.

Burning the Old Year

by:  Naomi Shihab Nye

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.   

Notes friends tied to the doorknob,   

transparent scarlet paper,

sizzle like moth wings,

marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,   

lists of vegetables, partial poems.   

Orange swirling flame of days,   

so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,   

an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.   

I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,   

only the things I didn’t do   

crackle after the blazing dies.

December 29: Death, Debbie Reynolds, "Strawberry Picking"

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I know death is a natural part of life, but I'm getting a little tired of it.  I was actually thinking that I might make to January 1st without any close member of our family dying.  I was wrong. 

Granted, my wife's grandmother was almost a century old.  She had a long, mostly good life.  But that doesn't make the loss any easier.  And, of course, 2016 has claimed a good many famous people, as well.  Yesterday, Debbie Reynolds died, one day after her daughter, Carrie Fisher, passed.  The Grim Reaper is having a good year.

August of 2015, I wrote the following poem for my sister's funeral:

Strawberry Picking

by:  Martin Achatz

You took me strawberry picking
once, drove out to a farm
where we paid to squat in green
beds laced with tongues of red.
I could feel my ears and neck
tighten under the punishing
sun as we filled Morning Glory
ice cream buckets with our
harvest, each berry looking to me
like some vital body part,
an organ or muscle necessary
for life.  You sat on your haunches,
fingers staining red, as if you
were some battlefield surgeon
patching up the fallen with only
your hands.  Every now and then,
you would lift a berry to your lips,
eat it in a hummingbird moment,
smiling the smile of the freshly
healed at Lourdes, where miracles
are common as empty wheelchairs
or dandelions in a July field.

The days since you've been gone,
I see strawberries everywhere,
in a welt of blood on my lip
after shaving, a stop sign,
a friend's dyed hair,
my son's sunburned shoulders,
oxygen in the gills of a perch.
Last night, I stood outside, under
ribbons of borealis, watched
them glide between the stars
like garter snakes in a midnight
Eden.  The Bible says that, in the cool
of the day, Adam and Eve heard
God taking a stroll through
the garden.  There were probably
peacocks nesting in the pines,
a stream talking with moss and stone,
the scurry of mole and spider
in the ferns.

That's what I believe you heard
in your last moments of breath.
You heard peafowl screams,
brook trout leaps.  Grasshopper wing
and corn silk.  And you heard
His divine toes in the grass, walking
along.  When He came to you,
He couldn't resist.  He reached down,
plucked you from the stem.  You were
ripe.  Sweet.  Ready.  He put you
in His Morning Glory bucket, continued
on into the dew and sunlight.


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December 28: Without Judgement, Wife's Grandmother, "In the Nursing Home"

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My wife's grandmother spent so much of her life taking care of other people.  She gave love freely, without judgement.  I can only hope to live up to her example of compassion and generosity of spirit.  She made me feel welcome into her family from the first time that I met her.  Well, almost from the start.

She lived in a nursing home for the last eight or nine years of her life.  For the last three years, she was greatly diminished.  This past year, she slept most of the time.  At her last birthday party, I don't even remember her waking up.

I wrote this poem about six years ago, after visiting my wife's grandmother one Saturday afternoon.  I had completely forgotten about this until this morning. 

In the Nursing Home

by:  Martin Achatz

Birds sing.  Finches.  Canary and sparrow.

Saffron, green, blue feathers.

This time of year, the nests are full

Of new life, creatures smaller

Than thumbnails, blind to their world

Of glass and wood and seed.

My daughter crowds around the enclosure,

Watches anxious flit, hears mother

Birds scream to protect newborns.

Our visit will be short today.

My wife walks her grandmother

To the dining hall, keeps up

A steady monologue of news.

Our daughter's in fifth grade.

Our son's going to be three in September.

When they reach the aviary, they stop.

Her grandmother narrows her eyes

At the flutter and squeak inside.

Emmet hasn't come yet, she says to my wife.

I waited for him yesterday.

She looks up at my wife, says, He never came.

My wife stares at her a few moments.

Grandpa died five years ago, remember?

Her grandmother smiles, nods.

They turn into the dining hall, to the smell

Of turkey and steamed broccoli.

My daughter points to a hatchling

That's fallen out of its nest.  It struggles

To return to the place of food, feather comfort.

Help it, my daughter says to me.

Someone will, I say, not sure

If I'm telling the truth or not.

I stare at the tiny bird's pink skin,

At its quick, hungry breaths,

Its fatal need for love.

Someone will, I say again.

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December 28: A Pricked Balloon, Wife's Grandmother, Homecoming

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He didn't jump; I crept closer.  At last I knelt on the island's winterkilled grass, lost, dumbstruck, staring at the frog in the creek just four feet away.  He was a very small frog with wide, dull eyes.  And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag.  The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed.  His skin emptied and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent.  He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football.  I watched the taut, glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and rumple, and fall.  Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water:  it was a monstrous and terrifying thing.  I gaped bewildered, appalled.  An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog; then the shadow glided away.  The frog skin started to sink.

Dillard's little paragraph pretty much drives home the fact that death is never easy, rarely pretty.  She watches life literally drain from the frog, a sight that she describes as "monstrous and terrifying."  One minute, the frog's eyes are are seeing and seen.  The next, they are shriveling into oblivion.  I agree with Dillard.  Death is bewildering and appalling.

Many of you may already be aware that my wife's grandmother, Corinne, passed away late last night.  She was 98 years old, and she had not been doing well for many years.  We already knew that the end was near, but, when the phone started ringing at eleven o'clock last night, I couldn't help but feel like Dillard on the banks of Tinker Creek, watching the frog sink into nothingness.

Of course, as a Christian, I do not believe that death is a filmic fade out.  On the contrary, I think that there's a whole lot of horn blowing and hallelujah-ing on the other side when somebody dies.  It's a homecoming, not a Dylan Thomas raging.  Souls are never lost.  They are always found.

Now, I am not sentimentalizing death here.  Death sucks.  It hurts.  My wife's grandma lived almost a full century, and yet, when I picked up the phone last night, my wife's sister was crying.  Corinne was a good woman.  Took care of her family until she was almost ninety years old.  Cooked Thanksgiving turkey, Christmas turkey.  Never forgot a birthday.  Always had ice cream in the summer, hot tea in the winter.  And she never missed church on Sunday morning.

She also endured a whole lot of tragedy.  She saw both of her children die before her.  As a parent, I simply can't imagine that.  Yet, I can honestly say that I only saw her cry on a couple of occasions.  My memory of Corinne will always be of a woman who was constantly laughing and playing games.  Loving life, despite its brokenness.

So, tonight, I lift up my wife's grandmother, Corinne.  Be sad with us.  Rejoice with us.  There's a new saint up there, watching over us.

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