Virginia Strong Newlin:
Convallaria
Lilies-of-the-valley,
white and fragrant,
were laid in my mother’s hands.
Roses of any color,
red or pink or yellow,
made her sneeze.
So even at her funeral,
my father would not
allow roses into the church.
Thirty years later,
Paul’s Scarlet Climber
covers my fences.
I grow hybrid teas as well,
but for fragrance I walk
into a glen of dark green leaves.
There I find white belled fairy wands,
with a scent as sweet
as my mother’s fine hands.
IN NEVIS, REMEMBERINING NEW JERSEY
Looking at this soft and silvery sea,
I remember high green Atlantic rollers
and my father on the boardwalk
walking on his hands.
My strong father with the sharp tongue,
trained too often on the soft shells
of his young children.
In my nightmare, the sea surrounds the boardwalk
where he ran backward while we
ran after him, never catching; laughed
when we called, stop, Daddy, stop.
In the dream I run back and forth,
search for some safe way to shore,
to the wide-pillared porch where my father
sits with his friends and his drinks while
the sea rises and the wind sucks my shirt.
I could have called, should have; he would have
walked on his hands through the waves
for me, for any of his children,
but I didn’t know that then
and neither did he.
FATHER NEPTUNE
In the sailboat tipping
blue water sluiced
over my britches.
I thought you must
have stirred it
to slop up and
humiliate me,
a small child afraid
of slip-slipping
into the sea,
stuck to the sloping deck,
my bottom, sodden,
heavy as the huge bellied sail.
You laughed,
hauled me to the high deck
for the tack back to the dock,
told my mother waiting there,
“Virginia wet her pants.”
You were a trouble-making god. .
Later, I would read how you drowned mariners
entangled in the threads of your beard,
twined sea serpents in the tines of your trident,
marooned Ulysses to be enchanted by Circe,
and how you wrecked the ships of the Greeks.
MY SISTER AND I HAVE OUR PALMS READ
We joke and laugh and have another drink.
We laugh a lot and have another drink.
We all begin to have a blast, I think.
And then the fortune teller gets to us.
She’s been around the room and gets to us.
So I go first, the others make a fuss.
She says my hand is lucky. I’ll be blessed,
Be cared for always. I’ll be blessed.
My sister’s hand shows struggle, loneliness.
We all are silent. It is grim
To hear her ugly fortune, it is grim.
My sister’s date says she can count on him.
And though I laugh, I know it isn’t right.
So smart and pretty, her future should be bright.
COMMITTAL
When Nancy dropped her handbag in the grave
the funeral came quite close to comedy.
The rector went on praying quietly
(because of laryngitis), so perhaps
the purse was granted entrance to the land
of light and joy.
Or would have been without the boy who,
prone, thrust down an arm and pulled it out.
The rector went on praying quietly
(because of laryngitis), and the bunch
beneath umbrellas strewed their blossoms
on the grave.
Then suddenly the prayers were over,
noses blown, eyes mopped, although
the heavens still rained on the life released
as he had lived it, teetering between
laughter and tears.
