In Memoriam

Very early this morning--at 2:20 a.m.--marks the 45th anniversary of my mother's death.   Flora Severini Kowinski bore three children, my sisters and me, and lived to know one grandchild.  Eventually there were three grandchildren, all girls.  Now there are five great-grandchildren, all boys but one.

Despite the technical difficulties in rescuing this old print, this is the best photo I ever took (you need to click on it to get the entire photo.)  That's my mother, my sister Kathy and grandfather facing the camera, with my sister Debbie facing them.  I took this squeezing between the sink and the table in my grandparents' tiny kitchen, out of which came so many wonderful meals.  I caught a moment in their card game--such spontaneous moments weren't often considered appropriate for photos back then.

At this time of year I often wish we'd had more time, especially in the middle and later years of my life when I had enough perspective to hear about her life.  But the opening lines of the second Merwin poem I posted had special and specific meaning for me as this anniversary arrives:

  All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know

R.I.P. W. S. Merwin (1927-2019)

Once Later

It is not until later
that you have to be young

it is one of those things
you meant to do later

but by then there is
someone else living there

with the shades rolled down
how could you have been young there

at that time
with all that was expected

then what happened to
the expectations

there is no sign of them there
a shadow passes across the window shade

what do they know in there
whoever they are

W.S. Merwin
published in New York Review of Books
May 7,2015



Rain Light

All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning

W.S. Merwin
published in the New Yorker
March 2008

Merwin, a hero among poets since the 1960s, not only defended the forests but planted one.  The world he spoke for has lost its voice.  And yet..tomorrow we wake without question, even though the whole world is burning.