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MEMORIAM FOR MY UNCLES

Arthur Benjamin Franklin: my Unca Artie, my favorite. A High School football star, known as Red Franklin, he was famous for his dark red hair.  He used to chuck me into deep water at Chrystal Pool to terrify me for 5 seconds, then hoist me onto his broad shoulders.I suspect I was his favorite too.  War came and he had to go.  I cried and cried on the herringbone patterned bricks at the train depot in Kelso. I have a v-mail he sent to my mom, his sister, dated 1942.  He was a belly gunner on the B-17’s that  were flying the area where Rommel was fighting.  He brought my sis and I back little leather suitcases, tooled in wonderful designs by a skilled artist somewhere in the orient. I still have it.  A treasure.

Grover Cleveland Franklin: My suave uncle, joined the Navy in WWII and became a deep sea diver. The kind that wore those heavy suits with the big glass bubble head.  He helped detect and destroy mines around battleships.  In doing that brave work he lost his hearing and came home as a lip reader for most of my childhood. I was always  a bit suspicious because he seemed to read lips so well. He even got written up in the newspaper because he could sing while putting his hands on a phonograph and feeling the vibrations of the music he couldn’t hear. We kids would always try to make loud noise behind him but he never once reacted to it.
Many years later I learned that he confessed that his hearing had gradually came back.  He was a hero nevertheless.

About their names: Both being born in North Carolina, back in the 1920’s it was common practice among the country folk to name sons after famous people.  I also have another distant relative named George Washington Franklin. I love having hillbilly DNA.

I’m in a contest I can’t win
Or even come in second.
My bird has flown from the streetlight arm
And taken promise with it.

Another lands and then departs
To mock my hopeful prayers
The sky teems with symbolic fowl
But I can’t suss their meaning.

A big one flew straight over me
But I can’t read its message.
Was it promising good health
Or telling me it’s sorry

That I’ll only get just what I have
To get me through tomorrow
And if I am not strong enough
The game will then be over.

Why are birds the messengers
In answer to my pleas
They send me signals I can’t read
And I walk on in darkness.
ljm

I am a mother without a child
Who comes to me for comfort.
I am a mother with a child
Who walked away from loving care
And chose to be a distant friend
Instead of a loving daughter

I am a mother with only one
Who really wanted to have two,
And wouldn’t have been sad at three.
But never won the right to choose
And had to make the best of what
Was offered as my portion.

Fifty years have come and gone
Plus two more for good measure.
The gap has narrowed not a whit
And my path still skirts the chasm.
I reach with practiced carefulness
To read the card that is my lot
As a mother with no daughter.
ljm

I need time
To be normal again —
If I can ever be the way I was

I need time
For those thousands of emotions to settle —
If they can ever settle  

I need time
To not cry
To beat the sadness
To sleep well —
And not to wake up with an aching heart

I need time
For my mind to clear
To function logically

I need time
To smile again
To tell you that everything is okay

Because it’s not okay
I am not okay

So don’t tell me to move on just now
Don’t tell me to not hold on to the past
Don’t tell me this and that

Because I loved deeply
And I love deeply

Because I am grieving —
And though for someone, it may be one less person in a world of over 8 billion people
To me, she was my mother, my world

In the winter of
My darkest sadness
A candle glows,
Tiny and so far away.
It gives the darkness
A focal point and I
Struggle my way towards it.

Another candle lights my way.
I don’t know where it came from
But it makes a fearful journey
So much easier to manage,
And I eventually will dance
On thistledown to
The music of the Skylarks
In a sun-filled, cloudless sky.
  ljm