BY JAN HAAG
DORIS
12-20-97
Doris, Mother, mourning,
forever --
Devayani seldom
thinks of you.
And yet, if she tells a
story
or reads your death party poem
she cries.
She bows
quite frequently, quite gaily
to you, there asleep, sprinkled
among
the azaleas,
and to Father, under the cheery tree,
fresh in her
walk,
almost every morning,
in the glory of the
Arboretum.
Often chanting, Devayani
strolls,
long-legged,
loose-limbed, by,
cheeks aflame with the cold
winter air
off to commune in cyberspace;
at last, so glad to be
alive,
having lived to the age of Websites,
as if she were born to
be
a black widow on the Web,
passing, too, multi-level
dwellings
of the spiders,
visible in the fog,
but gone now,
in the biting cold
of winter.
If it snows, she'll cry
again,
Devayani will cry
thinking of the strolls
in the
snow,
with you, Mother,
pouring her troubled heart
into the
warm receptacle of
your understanding.
Not until a Mother dies,
Devayani found out the hard way,
the only way,
that with a
Mother's passing
passes from the earth
the only
understanding,
deep and profound,
that she would ever
know.
The love of a Mother
-- warm, strolling in the
snow,
mittened and listening,
laughing in the illuminated
night,
knowing Devayani,
flesh of her flesh --
reveals
itself, year by year now,
in unexpected ways,
like the thousand
petalled lotus of the heart,
teaching the loss.
Teaching, too, that
it is tolerable,
and seldom remembered,
for it is kept hidden,
like a comment
in cyberspace,
as it grows bigger, like a
Website,
as intricate and beautiful
as fog shrouded, bejeweled
webs.
O, you'd take it out
and look at it more often,
Devayani,
if it didn't make you cry.
Mother wove a web of
remembance
strong enough to catch forever,
an aging fly, like
you.
Happy Birthday, Doris -- 91 years today
since your own
gift of a mother.
Do your almost-twelve-years-seperated-molecules,
still and often cry?
Devayani will probably see
the
Millennium
you wanted so to see --
she'll think of
you.
Copyright © 2000 Jan Haag
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Jan Haag may be reached via e-mail: jhaag@u.washington.edu
The Cattle Have Diamond Bones
Feeding Frenzy
From The Jocasta Poems #15, Blindness
From The Jocasta Poems #16, Death
George Coluzzi
India
I Am Innuit
McDonald Observatory
Palimpsest I, Sphere
Ryoangi
Tibetan Chronicle
The Woman Who Had No Necklaces
BY JAN HAAG