Wednesday, January 15, 2014

At Home in Winter: For My Father, on His Birthday

It doesn't get much easier, but doing things to remember them is the important thing.
Below is a video I was up into the wee hours making, and it did help ease the heart.
I hope you'll watch it, because this is not just his life, this is all of our lives. We are born and we live and we pass, and every moment is beautiful.

At Home in Winter:
A Poem for my Father

At home, snowy-patched fields are stitched
with spines of leafless trees,
the memory of summer
asleep in their mounds.
Here where the fist of some long-weathered god
thrust his hand through the crusted earth,
where fingers played in pressed thumbs 
or clawed their way South 
leaving frost covered pools,
half-frozen green lakes.

Soon, when you rise,
the world will be covered in snow.
There are places in the woods
where the thin deer
bed
under low brambles of a thorn tree,
where white-tipped foxes burrow
in red-berried thickets,
where the water trickles
icy channels between rock and stream,
and the fissures of shale that splintered up inside you
can sense these things,
but they have no name.

Here the houses haven’t closed in.
There is room enough to walk and breathe,
and to listen to the way the pines creak
on the backbone of the hill,
because there is no port on an inland sea.

Here the lady of the water drew her slender fingers down,
carving places where you can still cast your wishes,
where you can cast your wishes away and forget them,
the way a sorrow is lost in the papery fold of a wrinkle,
the way that the hills lie naked in winter,

in the places where the sun does not reach.

Copyright: Signe Pike


6 comments:

  1. Beautiful post, beautiful video, beautiful Father and Friend - happy memories! Joy x

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  2. Beautiful tribute. Beautiful music. His teaching you and his/your love of nature is so clear and moving.

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  3. Such a lovely tribute. It makes me think of late mother - thank you for sharing this with us and for reaching out! Hugs to you!

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    Replies
    1. Thanks also to Laurie, Leigh and Kristin. I so love hearing from you... hugs back. - Signe

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