Shannon Beck

 

A song to remember my mother’s death:

 

Dancing Bones

copyright 2006

If I could I’d bring you lilacs from my yard

White and purple, dizzying like love sitting in this old Kerr jar

I would set them on your dinner table – walk away if I was able

There are so many ways to love

 

Holy stones and dancing bones are all that’s left to give

One needs to let you go and the other make you live

But I am made of flesh and fear just like all the others here

I will peel back the covers; hope there is something left here to discover

Time is all we have but we cannot control it

Much as try, if we are truthful, we know it

I filled mine up with fantasies gave them to you for free

Until what was left of you came tumbling down.

 

You were a shelter when the storms were blowing

You were a wildfire burning out of control with my knowing, with my knowing

 

It seems that I have carved out for you a holy space

I didn’t even know I’d carved it out until it was far too late

From this distance I cannot pray away this change

I hope across these many miles you sense in some small way

 

That Holy stones and dancing bones is all that’s left to give

One wants to let you go and the other make you live

But I am made of flesh and fear - just as all the others here

I will turn back the covers and see what’s left here to discover.

 

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The Monastery Tree

February 2006

How old are you,

you growing moss and lichen, sage-scaled fingers

and hair

where blossoms used to be?

Last year’s leaf shells are disheveled cocoons

Brown and brittle, I think they would crush in my hands if I held them

But look

even so

at the crown of your head are many little mouths

opening to the sun,

drawing all the way down through what appears dying,

down through limbs with mating moss to toes digging up a cool drink of musky earth.

You are alive –

not simple garden structure for the winter

I see blue against your crunchy brown

Can you receive my adoration?

Although we never touch?

How many black-capped chickadees have you sheltered?

How many spiders have made their homes in your folds

How many children have you sent off to college?

100,000? a million?

And how hard did you labor in your growing, fighting cold and drought – showing off in spring and summer?

I want to love you in your golden years with wrinkled bark and ingrown roots – balding here and there,

growing hair in funny places

I am more sure than ever

when I think of all you’ve weathered,

that there is a place for me

February 2006