A Quaker Memorial Meeting
-The following is the poem I wrote and read at my friend Alwyn Moss’s (November 3, 1926 – April 21, 2022) memorial service at the Quaker House in Blacksburg, where there was music, poems and Open Worship sharing and story telling. The second poem I read, First Tree (a gingko) is one of Alwyn’s from Remembering Their Names- A Gathering Time, her poetic legacy.
Where the Grass is Greener
“I never found a 4-leaf clover”
she told a lover in a dream
then repeated it to me
and I heard it as an epitaph
her essence distilled
in depth mythology
I imagined that I pressed one
into her frail open hand
the one from my brother Danny’s wallet
that I took from his apartment when he died
It was sealed in cellophane
embossed with gold letters
‘Good Luck’ wishes for its lucky owners
Still hinting green and faintly scented
the way her Yorkshire tea
almost smells like kelp
He needed the purchased luck
for the hope of a liver transplant
when he wasn’t sick enough
to be high on the waiting list
and then was deemed too sick
to survive it
And what would she spend her luck on?
To save her songbirds? Her feral cats?
To write a new poem
reach age 95?
To drink tea with friends
squirrels and wrens
on her patio?
She never found a four-leaf clover
or saw the Everglades
but she remained faithful
and left behind a windfall
in the name of nature’s holy spirit
Will we all need a lucky ticket
to arrive where the grass is greener?
And will we remember
the luck that brought us together
the lived-out days
and the ordinary ways
we gave our time
and our love
to each other
Colleen Redman
First Tree
There was only one tree on the block
where I was a child. A single messenger
from woods I rarely saw.
A pale slim thing set in some sand and earth
behind a ring of metal spokes.
By who? What angel set it there?
Not maple or an oak
but some kind that could breathe
despite the gas and dust and howls of sirens
from the hospital six lanes across Broadway.
Winters the leafless stalk shed half its bark
Leaving dark patches on the paler skin below.
In spring the miracle!
And more the miracle on that bleak block
Of dirty brick and cracked concrete;
sprigs of green coming out in long twirls
Until there they were, flat and clean
like open hands above us as we played.
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:
first snow that turned the pavement slippery but fun.
The moist dim basement where giant cockroaches lived
under the old washing machines.
The wheelchair child’s shrill laughter,
full moons over the water towers
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 realm.
Still remembered…the secrets have come true.
Alwyn Moss
Read Alwyn’s obituary HERE.
We were lucky to have know her. She may not have found a four-leaf clover, but “the secrets have come true.” Thanks, to all of her extended chosen family who manifested her memorial as Alwyn wanted and took care of her in her last years better than some with biological families, which Alwyn didn’t have.
