Still Life

Sep 23, 2011 by Kristen    No Comments    Posted under: On Death, Poetry

Two lines on a stick

Families are told, joy fills for a small

Still Life

Hope breathes true

Then a flick of a wrist, a heartless picture and you’re gone

Still Life.

Frozen in black and white

In cruel brush strokes — this horror, this painting

My Still Life

Stone Sentries

Sep 11, 2011 by Kristen    No Comments    Posted under: On Death, Poetry

Reach to the sky
To the walls
The fortress of Five
Afire and frightened
Tumbled and twisted
By aerial masochists

Lives stolen
Flown to their end
On fast and furious wings
Bastions of bravery
Strength and struggle
A wish and a prayer
For you

Reach to the sky
To the walls
And rest in peace
As stone sentries
In a garden
Of our memories

Frère Jacques

Sep 6, 2011 by Kristen    No Comments    Posted under: On Death, On Humanity, On Life, Poetry

Late afternoon wanes across the chilling hillside
As church bells peal for another hour passed
Deep and resonating, high and hopeful
Delivering me to the ironic memory of a childhood song
Are you sleeping?
 
There are many who sleep here
Beneath an army of perfectly rowed stones
Under a frozen earth
And I walk among their markers
Wondering how little is revealed

In the front of the yard, reverence begets silence
As visitors in suits wear their grief cut fresh
Like the flowers and wreaths in their arms
The voices here are no more than murmurs
While the dead are still comforted by living memories

In the back, where shadows stretch long
Across the frost-bitten blades
And mossy fingers reach
To obscure what time has not crumbled
Quiet gives way to a crescendo of history

Dates and names are all that remain
For those who fail to listen
Yet a brush of flesh across cold stone
Brings understanding
Of a story that needs to be told

Here lies John Plourde, b. 1801 d. 1847
Then the writing dies silent
A man of wife and children, speak those buried alongside him
And a man, perhaps, with the grace to cherish
The gifts that lay before him in death as in life

Deeper into the shadows of the past, others beg for attention
A wife and husband who joined each other here, days apart
A child who lived short, but loved long
A woman delivered in her prime, kept company by her parents
Then questions slowly overcome stories and suppositions

Did they know true love?
Was he defined by his kindness, his friendship?
Did she achieve her dreams and goals?
Did they learn to accept life’s little twists in blissful happiness?
Were they missed?

Each voice, each question and answer bombards me as I pass
Knowing what the living often cannot, what the living often ignore
Our future is held in our past, our past in our future
And in both, there is only one question that will matter when we exist no more
What will our story tell?

Among These Halls

Aug 13, 2011 by Kristen    No Comments    Posted under: On Death, On Humanity, On Life, Poetry

Among these halls, these
Photos of life, these
Shadows of deaths to be
I hear the whispers, the
Unified voice, “the
truth—at last we see,
what once imprisoned me.”

(written upon visiting the National Holocaust Museum, Washington D.C.)