An Old Portrait

After my mother died in June, I went through lost of family pictures, including some from over a hundred years ago. It made me reflect on the people portrayed in them, thinking of who they were at the time they were photographed.

It’s a full-length portrait, head to foot.
He wears a dark suit, white shirt, and white bow-tie.
He bends his arms behind his back, hands out of sight,
the pose that’s favored by the awkward. 
She stands beside him, dressed in white from neck
to just above her ankles. She seems to lean
towards him the slightest bit. 

I’m quite sure who they are, though they 
don’t look like the people I remember.
In the days to come, he would grow his waist
and lose his hair; her face would hibernate 
behind thick glasses.

I see them through a grandchild’s eyes
but that is not the people whom they always were.
Unmoored once, 
they got to freely walk around the city, 
imagining the places they might live,
the people they might meet and marry,
and the man or woman each would come to be. 
I would have liked to travel back across 
the vast sea 
of time to meet them then: 
I wonder what our conversation might have been. 

 

Allhallow–A Poem

Tomorrow is All Saints’ Day, a day for Christians to remember those who went before us in the faith. Remembering our predecessors is part of seeing ourselves as one with them:

“The choice is not to load our ancestors down with honors or run away from them as fast as we can–our countercultural faith requires us to take the past seriously and to receive its people warmly and wisely. It requires us to be generous, and in a fundamental way truly inclusive.” Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering

Here’s a poem I wrote for All Saint’s Day in 2005 and recently revised:

ALLHALLOW

Our fellows stepped along the highways of history,
persevering through the nights and staggering against the storms,
withstanding the pull from clan or past companions,
spurning the flash and sparkle of roadside diversions.
They seldom walked alone
for their strength was in the intertwining.
When the passage was obstructed,
a hundred shoulders pushed as one to clear the way.
When a member of their number fell,
two hundred hands would lift the faltering one,
a hundred tongues would rumble with encouragement.
They were a host but not a horde,
intermixed but each distinct.
These are the saints that constitute the church;
its amaranthine beauty spans the ages.
We now walk along the pathways they inscribed:
we are the ones
following the followers of Christ.