A Particular Stone

I'm thinking about my dear mother today, May 23. It's been six years.

Looking back at the posts I wrote here around the time of her death, I found this photograph and these poems, sent by my friend who was then blogging under the name of Abdul-Walid. They felt like just as much of a gift today as when I received them six years ago. Here's the photograph, and what I wrote then.

That cobblestone has come with me to Montreal now, and it's in my garden, where I went very early this morning to spend some quiet time. When I pick the stone up, I think of it in her hand.

---

The Cassandra Pages, June 5, 2006: "The former blogger known as Abdul-Walid recently sent two poems which I am pleased to publish here. The photograph was taken last week. I had been thinking about the poems and wondering about a suitable image: rocks wouldn't do, and not just any stone. After my mother died, the people who live around the same lake sent two beautiful rose plants to the house in her memory. I went out to the garden to plant them. On the four corners of the raised bed I noticed that my mother had placed four stones - all round cobblestones, similar to this one, tumbled and rolled under the glacier which once scoured our area of central New York. They are so numerous that some local houses and barns even have cobblestone facings or foundations. This was the best one: inscrutable, enigmatic, beckoning."

EVEN A STONE

Even a stone
is too wonderful
for me.
But I must
begin somewhere.

There are days
when a stone is all
I can meet, it alone,
or at most a poem
into which
its secret has
been poured. But

even a stone
is too wonderful
for me,
even there
I cannot
begin.

----

TO A STONE

Final,
ground's eye,
confide in me.

Let me not be
like those who say:
“the sky is blue.”

Enough with
this describing.
What you have hidden
you have hidden.

Ferns, horses,
people, gods
have all gone
another open way.

But don’t say a word:
I couldn’t bear it
were you, too,

to mar this small
longed-for
silence.

--Abdul-Walid

Comments

[Lorianne]

Feels like yesterday.

[Rachel Barenblat]

What beautiful poems. What a beautiful image. What a beautiful remembrance.

Today is my mother's birthday (76, but shhh, don't tell :-) so this post is especially poignant for me...

Thinking of you, dear Beth.

[Dale Favier]

I remember those. Yes. Wonderful.

[Robert]

Wishing you peace and serenity, Beth, on this special day.

[Beth]

Thank you all, very much.

[Pica]

Thank you for the chance to read these again, Beth....

[Lorenzo da Ponte]

Blogging can have a tangential effect on one's mourning. In 1971, when my family and I were living in Pittsburgh I received a phone call just before Christmas from my brother that my mother, living in Yorkshire, was grievously ill. In fact she died over Christmas but I didn't learn of this because of delays in the transatlantic service typical at that time of the year. I flew back to the UK, attended the funeral and a few months later we all returned to the UK for good. We'd been in the US about six years at the time I've never been entirely sure whether it was my mother's death that triggered the return.

I didn't have any particular physical memento of my mother but I was lucky in the intangibles she had left me. My mother had written novels (unpublished) and poetry (quite a bit published) and it was through her influence that I took up journalism which lasted the whole of my working life.

Decades passed and I doubt a day went by without my thinking about her. In 2009 I started blogging and after a year or so I posted one or two Shakespearean format sonnets on joky cynical lines. Where the impulse came from I do not know since I had read almost no poetry beforehand, let alone written any. Perhaps a year later I suddenly decided to write a serious sonnet about that awful Christmas in Pittsburgh, now forty years in the past. The structure is defective but a couple of lines do represent my feelings. Of course I was writing for her not for anyone else. I thought about the lines of communication that went back to my childhood when I borrowed her double-keyboard typewriter to write stories. I wondered whether an imperfect bit of poetry was a satisfactory tribute or not. In the end of course the range of options is small. I see you are talking about a gap of six years and that particular remembrance; I hope that scene stays sharp for you and does not blur.

[Beth]

Yes, Pica, I was glad to re-read them and revisit some memories of the writer and other friends at that time!

Lorenzo, thanks for sharing these stories and your own poetic journey with your mother in mind. And thank you for your wish -- I hope my memories of her stay sharp too.