I hold a handful of pomegranate seeds— I think of you all I know and do not know--
A bushel of grapefruits arrive at the front door. The next day, a bushel of oranges followed by a bushel of pomegranates, like tribute foretelling the arrival of some dignitary or prince. Every summer, the bushels foreshadowed your visits-- The grapefruits and oranges for my mother, who loved all citrus, a luxury for she didn’t have growing up in West Virginia. The pomegranates for me-- You knew I loved them. Why did the bushels and the visits stop after the summer I turned six?
These seeds I hold, ready to throw into today’s salad, are too few—
I remember you— showing me how to open a pomegranate; teaching me to count in Greek; moving a stepstool to the counter so I could climb and see how to make Greek yogurt from scratch, when you saw my nose wrinkle at the smell, telling me, “You will like it because you Greek,” your accent as thick and heavy as the clabbered milk in the yogurt glasses.
The last summer you came to visit— A train ride to Florida to stay the whole summer with you and Aunt Mae. I wanted the top bunk in the train car. You tucked me into the lower one saying, “You fall here. No hurt. You fall from up there, you hurt,” before hefting yourself into the top bunk. You said you’d teach me to swim. “Everybody in Greece swim. I teach you. You learn easy because—” you paused, waiting-- for my six-year-old excitement to finish, “I’m Greek!” You tousled my hair then loaded our things in the car.
Everything to be tried, to be learned, to be shown required our liturgical call and response: you would start, “You will like because—" and I would finish, “I’m Greek.”
Teaching me to swim didn’t work out too well— You told me to move my arms and legs fast, then threw me into the ocean. Each time I flailed and sank. Each time you pulled me up, “You okay. You learn.” The third or fourth throw, You pulled me up And said, “Enough today. But you learn because—” And despite my fearful sobbing, I finished, “I’m Greek,” as I wrapped my arms around your neck. We did not have time. I never learned.
Sirens, red lights, dark outside, Aunt Mae crying. The hospital cold, noisy. Mae on the phone. Mommy coming on the train.
You lived. Came home. Peeled me a pomegranate.
Mom and I left on the train. The last time I saw you, Uncle Pete, though you did not die until three months after my high school graduation, an obituary found on the internet tells me so. But the bushels, the visits, the phone calls Stopped the summer I turned six. I never knew why. I will never know now.
Fifty-nine years after that summer with you, I stand holding a handful of pomegranate seeds, shining their ruby glow. Decades since last I split open a pomegranate. Too easy to buy in plastic tubs now. I need to finish this salad.
But I am stilled in the moment— The truth I now know— sleuthing through scraps of internet information after a DNA test-- What neither of us may have known that one summer, We were/ are father and daughter.
As I sit at my desk, I watch the does scale the stucco wall. Their leaps never fail to dazzle. Next, they stretch their necks to grab and eat the seed pods from the trees. Here, in the foothills of the Sandias, this sight wrings a sigh. Then I see him, outside the wall and to the left, watching the does. He is large but nearly hidden behind the tall Chamisa waving in the breeze. His head would be a prize to any hunter. His antlers tall and wide, many pointed. He steps away from the cover of the Chamisa. What I thought a waving branch— an arrow lodged in his left shoulder. He is the stag the neighbors have posted about— The one they say will eventually succumb to the wound. Reflexively, I rub my own left shoulder once frozen still from scar tissue until broken loose years ago by a medical procedure but now occasionally aches. How I wish I could help this buck. Remove the arrow, apply some healing balm, Let him recover here, feasting on seed pods, before sending him on his way only a scar to ache every once in a while.
(I originally wrote this several years ago, and it was published in my book, “The Gift of Mercy.” I’m drafting a second part to this piece and decided to reblog this as a starter.)
I entered life, an accidental tourist.
My mother’s body served an eviction notice,
but I ignored it and burrowed deeper
into placental warmth.
My twin, however, weaker,
entered the world a clotted, bloody,
gelatinous mess on the white tile
of a bathroom floor.
The doctor told the man,
who wasn’t really my father
but thought himself to be,
there was still a heartbeat,
still a baby left.
I felt the absence of my twin,
the lack of another’s heart
beating a rhythm to match my own,
racing toward emergence, light, life, breath.
A ghost like memory I carried with me
always— even when I, who survived
by claiming squatter’s right
to my mother’s uterus
as it tried to evict me
and who had never been told
of my twin’s existence, would
turn in childhood play and talk
to my twin sister.
My mother asking to whom I talked
and I answering in innocence—my twin sister.
Now, I recognize my mother’s twisting face
of guilt as she turned from my childhood answer:
the long walk from the restaurant’s apartment
to the stores on Broadway to buy school
supplies; the washing down of the restaurant
walls over and over again; the bed rest the doctor
said she needed when she was spotting, her body
threatening to throw out the babies she carried, ignored—
Times of shattered glass herald the approaching dark Crone of a world war.
At night, soldiers come children cry out, glass shards of fear crushed into their skin
If we do nothing-- slaves we become, breathing out blood drops of a dream, emptied of promise held within springtime blossoms of “a more perfect union”
The imbued promise of humanity dies, consumed with the cancer of fear. A swan song of church bells, calls to prayers drift on the winds. As humanity prays Salat al-Janazah, The Mourner’s Kaddish, El Malei Rachamim, A Prayer of Eternal Rest, Or Psalm 23– take your pick— While meditations for enlightenment circle the drain of wishes for the humane to be found within what humanity was created to be— Now only found in one minute sound bites of feel-good stories at the end of the evening news to give us hope for a brighter tomorrow, leaving a cloying aftertaste of baby food custard in the tiny souls we have left ourselves. Though drops of water possess the power to eventually wear away stone, these drops of feel-good stories can never fill the promise we never made reality-- the potential we were given and squandered. We fed the isotopes of our hate our selfishness our greed our self-aggrandizement until morbidly obese with evil that overtook our planet our souls our societies, and we became not the sweet dream any God saw in us but the nightmare now plaguing that God.
A barren tree stands tall and strong across the street. I see it weekly on days I volunteer. It’s naked limbs waving on windy days. High up, in the crux where two branches meet, sits a large, empty nest. Too large for small Avian visitors. Not a home for sparrows or finches, surely. Built by crows or grackles or large jays, perhaps-- The nest sits, stable and empty, as if a child took a large dark brown Sharpie and drew a circular blob when asked to draw a bird’s nest on a page featuring an outline of a tree.
Its emptiness captures me. Mirrors me. It stood, providing shelter for the young growing there. Now, abandoned by the young it once sheltered, the adult birds, no longer of use, have abandoned it as well-- Each having traveled on their way. Yet the nest survives-- Empty, except for the glue of memory attaching it to the tree-- As I am emptied of the young I once sheltered.
He covers his sunlit towhead with one of his blankies and loosens glistening giggles.
And I remember what it is to hide. Hiding, a thing of childhood, joyful for this boy of three with his shining towhead appearing sprinkled with glitter in the sunlight and the bubbling raspy giggles he lets loose as he covers and uncovers his shimmering head with his beloved blankie.
I learned to hide from the monster who pursued me. At times, the monster was too angry, too quick, and I had no time to hide. Other times, there was only time to seek refuge behind rustling silk dresses, a molting mink, and piled up shoe boxes—only to be yanked out by an arm, thrown across a room before the whipping began. On rare occasions, there was time to make it to the small bedroom on the third floor where there was a closet over the stairs. The floor of the closet was raised and filled with boxes of junk. The boxes created a barricade against the monster my mother often became when she drank. Though she drank daily, always drunk by the time the evening news came on, the monster did not appear every day. On any particular day, if the monster’s rage began as a slow simmer, I would silently slip away to that closet, crawl over the boxes, and listen as the rage of the drunken monster began boiling below, hoping the stomping monster did not make her way up to the third floor. That third-floor closet never failed. I never allowed myself to breathe in the safety of that third floor over the stairs closet until long after the sounds of raging below stopped. Then, closing my eyes, enjoying the silence, my muscles beginning to relax, I would breathe in the safety found in the darkness. By the time I was twelve, I had outgrown the safe haven of the third-floor closet. There was no way to crawl over the boxes without knocking them over and making noise. My hiding place lost; I had to find a new one. One I created—not truly safe or a hiding spot, but an escape. A way to stand and take the whippings of yardsticks, wooden then metal, without a cry or a whimper, to use my mind to create an escape, a place my body could not go, yet my mind could fly in moments to the safety of silent blackness.
This little three-year-old towheaded boy, finished with his hiding game, asks for cold, frozen, blueberries. Upon discovering there are no cold blueberries left, he wails. A grieving wail with fat tears. It is tragic, this absence of cold blueberries. And all I can do is find a distraction for him. But I smile and I am teary eyed at this dramatic switch from joyous laughter to tragic grieving loss of cold blueberries because he knows he is safe. He can go from laughter to tears because he does not doubt his safety here in this place among these hearts within this room filled with sunshine.
Later, when I hug and kiss him goodnight, I say a silent prayer that he never knows what it is to seek safety in darkness and only ever knows what it is to feel the safety offered in the warmth of sunshine.
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Hearing The Mermaids Sing 