Hannah’s Poem

Ted Morrissey

May 4, 1996

Great gray weeping day. Mute
mourners filling the pews,
like dark stones, like old
sea creatures come to observe
instinctively a season’s point
& passing. A cousin’s rhymed
poem. Flowers, flowers, pink. . .
so pink. A carnation petal
fallen to the floor, unnoticed
like a riverdrop: the natural
futilely bridled flow of
time & lives. Incomprehensible.

Soloist’s fragile amethyst voice
paces out, slowly, Jesus’s
lullaby which your mother sang
to you so faithfully. Remembering
the (now) painful twitch of
your grip on her finger. Longing
for it again someplace other than
dreams, other than that hard
damp space in the ribs, in the
skull. Vacant & full, filling with
moments & days & life’s years, like
snapshots in the what-not drawer.

Oncoming cars stop as if for
ambulances racing in the night.
The preciousness of the cargo,
so slight, somehow impresses the
drivers, fortunate they understand
to be going a different way. Not to
a small, so small, black grave. Not
to the beginning of the climbing out
carrying the weight of those who still
live & need us—thankfully. But we
climb out together, little ways at
first, but together after all & up.

Your mother’s wailing, expected
yet so hard nonetheless, seems
natural & right with the wind
flapping tent (blue canopy like
the day is becoming) & the minister’s
dissipating words & the suddenly
honking geese, ascending, paired
for life, like you & your Savior—
just as the minister is saying so.
Standing in a furrow between stones.

Your black-suited father, tall labyrinth
to view, has been here before & knows
two of life’s secrets: how a boy
buries his father, how a father
buries his daughter. . .& how to
climb on with all the joyful burden
of what remains. But with no sphinx
to riddle him & grant him safer passage.
Only knowledge inherited down time’s
long chain as surely as thumbs, as
language, as uprightness. . .even now
when stooping, crumpling, crumbling
seem so unavoidable. Yet will be we know.

You, so small, lie in the
white open coffin. Your photo,
with life-full eyes beaming
as we pass. Pink dress, lace,
tiny satin shoes. The white
teddy bear sadly unsoiled waiting
animately for your infant’s face
to brighten, to emerge from that
profound slumber that all
newborns know. But you
cannot & this photo & this
image is what we shall have
& it must be enough.