March 2018
As those who are dear to us start succumbing to the passage of time, I’m reminded of Edna St Vincent Millay’s poem titled “Dirge Without Music”— in which, referring to death, she repeats several times the phrase: “I am not resigned.” Her defiance might be viewed as unrelated to prayer, I guess; maybe even as anti-prayer. But after the loss of my husband of 40 years (the subject of the poem below, which was written eleven years before he died)—and, more recently, of Dick Allen and two other writer friends whom I miss terribly, I find a bizarre kind of comfort in rejecting the whole idea of mortality. Maybe that's a kind of prayer after all.
Poem for a 75th Birthday
Love of my life, it’s nearly evening
and here you still are, slow-dancing
in your garden, folding and unfolding
like an enormous grasshopper in the waning
sun. Somehow you’ve turned our rectangle
of clammy clay into Southern California,
where lilacs and morning-glories mingle
with larkspur, ladyfern and zinnia,
weaving their way across the loom
of your fingers—bending
toward the trellis of your body
making fabulous displays of their dumb
and utter gratitude, as if they knew
they’d be birdseed if it weren’t for you.
And yet they haven’t got the slightest clue
about the future; they behave as if
you’ll be there for them always, as if you
were the sun itself, brilliant enough
to keep them in the pink, or gold, or green
forever. Understandable, I decide
as I look at you out there—as I lean
in your direction, absolutely satisfied
that summer afternoon is all
there is, and night will never fall.
Originally published in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Spring/Summer, 2001
©2018 Marilyn L. Taylor
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