Loose Leaf Notes

It was part birthday party, part house concert and part book signing. It was a small gathering of friends at my friend Alwyn’s Blacksburg home to celebrate her 93rd birthday.  Amid the chocolate cherry cake, pumpkin pie, cherry garcia ice cream and her cat Cloudy, who wanted to get in the act, was a gift that Alwyn gave to each of us: the new expanded edition of her poetry collection, Remembering Their Names, a chapbook with twenty-eight poems from the original printing and fifteen new poems, along with the added subtitle A Gathering Time.

Dedicated to her mentor Thomas Berry, the collection reflects Alwyn’s sensitive awareness of the beauty and suffering of the world with poetry that she describes in the chapbook’s acknowledgement as a “legacy of my life.” The poems are an integrated part of her life as an author and environmentalist and are a testament to her awe of nature and her tenderness towards all living creatures.

Speaking of the first twenty-eight poems, she writes in the book’s introduction “… Having moved to southwest Virginia from a big city life in New York and elsewhere, I felt more at home almost at once as I breathed in the environment rich in trees, mountains and hills and the local wildlife that was prevalent at that time in this part of Appalachia…” She laments the loss of species “…But with the butterflies and birds, the great mammals and countless other species diminishing, I felt a greater need than ever to convey what I felt and saw of the plants and creatures in the first part of this collection.

The names in the first part include trees, waterfalls, a wasp, a snapping turtle and even slugs. She chronicles the death of a fish, a cat she has loved, a rabbit in the road “… Using some old newspapers from the backseat of the car / to protect me from maggots and the smell / But not the eye. No hiding from that circle of black / that seared through all defenses / A glistening sightless orb, wide open in surprise…” In Discount City, she is mournful of the loss of habitat and wildlife “… No memory of seeds remains under those vast acres of concrete / to remind us of the trees whose blossoms turned to fruits / with branches that held nests of promise every spring / and roots as homes for beings whose names / are written in the book of holy things…

Poem titles include The Empty Field, The Dog Tied Up, Plows into Swords, Elephants and Consider the Cows “…Their intimacy – the commonness – their lack of pride / a sense of stillness… Unlike the lilies of the field they work / jaws moving all day, laboring into fullness / All that we leave alone / still does its task, obeys / lifts up its life in constant praise…”

The fifteen new poems in A Gathering Time are a welcomed addition to the collection.  Reluctant over the years to focus on human-centered living, Alwyn reveals herself as an artist painting sensuality with words, intimate and moving, personal.  She writes of these poems that they were “written as I reflected on my human relationships – those most important in my childhood as well as from a later period in life when romantic love filled a different role…”

In a poem titled The Onion, she writes, “Mother, mother, pin a rose on me / But she only grew onions in her garden / preferring them to roses, which she said / she could not eat, but liked by far / “the juicy hardness of an onion” / And she too kept her layers tightly shut/ Knew how to protect her core…Only now, dear lady gone / I see your inner star.

In Memory, she writes of her father diving off a high board and landing head flat on his stomach “…Coming out of the pool shaking the pain off / like a dog does water / Pretending it wasn’t bad / For me. For me. / Daddy, courage was what you wanted / for your cowardly child / And so you climbed the stairs and dove / from where you had never dared to dive before / as I watched / I remember, I do remember / now an old woman cutting her hair.

One of my personal favorites, In Moving the Bed, relates to her love life.  “… Dragged from that corner / that little known niche / where it held what it held / far from the fray –  now joggled and shaken and open to view / on the back of a truck / Down the roaring highway / On its way to another space / another place. So different / Dazed as creatures whose personal space / is a root or a hole or a lair in a cave / We blink like bats frightened into day…

Another favorite is The First Tree, in part, because I remember her telling me about that tree, the only one in her busy city block that she could see from her bedroom window, a gingko. I also love it because it ends  on such sweetly innocent note.  “…Love? For that? / Even the branches were too frail to climb / although we tried. Yet decades later that single tree / erect and small in the long corridor / of grey lives in my eyes / holding my childhood on its thin arms / like laundry on a line … Ah tree, you made the world a promise / Your quiet breath at night beneath my city window / helped me sleep, entered my dreams / told me secrets from another dream / Still remembered … the secrets have come true.” – Colleen Redman

Post note: A week before her birthday open house, Alwyn and I spoke on the phone. She has a hard time hearing over the phone, so when I asked her what she wanted for her birthday, she answered, “A new pair of ears!” I brought her, a cat lover and author of Never Love a Feral Cat, cat ears, which she wore for the entire birthday celebration.