Poems
on Loss & Healing
THE
CATAFALQUE
I imagine
you, Grandmother,
as I sit by my friend’s
pale form,
both gone so young, leaving
hearts ripped
and shredded in the tiny
bodies
trailing in your unwilling
wake.
Her head on the pillow might
be yours:
hair smoothed back from
the high forehead,
features serene against
framework of clear
beautiful bone, skin white,
waxen,
unsullied by paint.
Soft folds creamy around
neck and shoulder,
black velvet drapes to the
floor.
Her sister places a circlet
of white anemones
on her brow, I lay a late
red rose
from her garden on her breast.
She looks like a medieval
young queen.
I bow my head over internal
words,
send a separate message
flying
that your babies grew and
prospered,
in their eighties, still
spoke of you.
MAIL
Washed by
a flood so red
and hot I think I’ll
dissolve
I stand by the mailbox
on a country road.
Tears leave salt tracks
down my cheeks. I tilt my
head
back, try to clear my eyes,
stare past the clouds
into what drifts behind.
Mail
scatters in the gravel at
my feet.
Strange that a simple envelope,
cheap
white paper bulging with
come-ons,
can open such wounds.
Your name in cheery computer-speak
flashes me straight to our
first kitchen:
you with hands wrapped around
your mug
laughing over the coffee
steam, you
with endless patience teaching
our two
little boys about tractors,
you
and those talented hands
stroking
the day’s work from
my rousing skin.
I want to shriek at some
nameless company,
enraged at the pain they’ve
caused.
Your name still on a mailing
list
sold over and over and over,
yet I buried you
thirty-eight years ago.
LETTING
GO
In the black
clothes usually reserved
for serious parties, they
filed into the church
for their classmate’s
funeral.
Blinked in the avalanche
of camera flash,
taped questions, whir of
fancy equipment.
Bowed their heads, some
stunned
into silence, others wailing.
In the middle of the next
week
they held their own memorial,
did not invite the grownups,
the press.
Gathered in their skinny
skirts,
baggy pants, cool sweatshirts
in the center of the football
field
after school. The class
clown
made a few jokes, class
president
got solemn then, at her
signal,
each hand released its grasp.
Into the orange-rose streaks
of the wild setting sun,
hundreds
of gold balloons soared,
each
with a slip of paper tucked
inside --
a line of love, a short
prayer, a single wish
for their slain friend.
Author
Biography
Patricia Wellingham-Jones,
former psychology researcher/writer/editor,
has been published in journals,
newspapers, anthologies,
and online. She has won
numerous awards and been
the featured poet in several
journals. Her most recent
books are Don’t Turn
Away: Poems About Breast
Cancer, Labyrinth: Poems
& Prose, Apple Blossoms
at Eye Level, Bags, and
Lummox Press Little Red
Book series, A Gathering
Glance. She lives in northern
California.
PWJ Publishing
http://www.snowcrest.net/pamelaj/wellinghamjones/home.htm
