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October 2021
Christine Gelineau
gelineau@binghamton.edu / www.christinegelineau.com
Bio Note: My name reveals my French heritage but I am equal parts Irish--my mother's parents were both born and raised in Ireland and I have always enjoyed the Celtic holiday of Halloween and always find some way to mark it. I also mark the anniversary of the loss of loved ones, though often only to myself. Culturally, Americans are conditioned not to look back and as a group we do not mark such anniversaries, though many other cultures do. These two poems are included in my collection Crave (from NYQ Books); my other full-length books are Appetite for the Divine and Remorseless Loyalty (both from Ashland Poetry Press).

Jack

Years have passed since I last entered
a church to be a part of those rituals
of chant, vestment, statuary, and incense
from which I am also descended, yet
October ends and I find myself
 
elbow-deep in a vegetable once again, 
scooping out the skull of a jack-o’-lantern
hands slicked with the vivid mess, acolyte 
to the animate knife, eager for that lurid face
blazing its eyes against the long, deep dark.
                        

Anniversary

for my father
 
Jews call it yarhtzeit, 
the Bangladeshi shraadh.    
Intent as we are with 
getting over, getting on, 
Americans have no term.  
October again, and the trees 
make such a pageantry of loss: 
orpiment, vermilion, cadmium leaves 
quiver in the steel wind 
that bites them free. 
In the long remembering of trees 
you are nearly there 
where you are not, and have not 
been some nine years now. 

I am at home here 
in the cascade 
of their radiant perishing.
                        
©2021 Christine Gelineau
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell her or him. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -JL
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