We
traveled south, recently, toward a funeral in New Orleans. We could see the
trees and bushes along the highway changing: still stark, bare and gray in
Missouri; the beginnings of greenery in Arkansas; the green growing gradually
upward in Mississippi; and finally the complete greenery that is southern Louisiana
most of the year.
Traveling
toward a funeral, and family, and childhood and growing up, and finally
leaving, it was a journey combining all of the elements of the subtitle of
L.L.Barkat’s new collection of poems – Love
Etc.: Poems of Love, Laughter, Longing and Loss.
I
even found a poem that almost exactly described our journey south:
Winter Road Trip
The
road is long as I travel south
and
the sun is low in the white sky.
Last
night I woke to a great silence,
in
a house that is anything but silent
by
day. Old pines keep watch
over
that dwelling, and the moon
keeps
watch, and I wish
for
this kind of watching,
but
my bedroom in the town where I live
looks
out over streetlights and the sounds
of
cars and sirens. In my room,
the
roads seem short, and I wonder
if
tonight I will dream of the long road
home,
and how the sun bathed the trees
in
gold, and how the sumacs leaned with flowers
the
color of some wine whose name
I
can’t remember, near the trees whose names
I’ve
never known, now strung with long red necklaces.
I
read these beautiful poems, and I’m struck with how closely connected love,
laughter, longing and loss truly are. Even love and loss, and not in an obvious
way like love lost, but in a less obvious but perhaps more accurate way – one experiences
love and all of what has come before becomes a kind of loss, never to be found
or rediscovered in precisely the same way, because love changes everything.
Barkat
takes us on a journey with these poems, and not only a winter road trip south. She
takes us to the edge of illness, to the borders of erotic love, to the defined
realities of sight, sound and smell and the loves that stands before the stove
in the kitchen, cooking soup. The poems are not only about relationships
between people, and lovers, but more than that, and there is something more
than that, the love that longs, that laughs, the love that sacrifices, and even
the love that becomes represented by loss.
And
beyond the journey, Love Etc. contains poems for the standing still, those
moments that are eternity. This poem, “Ours,” is the poem our mothers repeat to
themselves, including the mother whose funeral I’m attending:
We
call them to the world
before
we even know their names,
before
we understand
what
it will mean
to
lean beside their beds
on breath-thin nights.
They
teach us
how
to hold their hands,
shut
the lights,
pray
for dawn.
I
have been leaned over on those breath-thin nights, and I’ve been taught by my
own children how to hold their hands.
Love Etc. reminds us what
eternity is, and what part of it is contained within ourselves.
Photograph by Sabine Sauermaul via Public
Domain Pictures. Used with permission.
