The Sunday Poem: Larry Goodell . . . An Easter Sunday

It’s all gone dead dying out memories the fresh memories that live only in my mind. I relive them in flashes but the distance kills me so when I hum Stardust it’s my mother, teaching me to play the piano playing that piece as I learned it. And when I think of San Antonio Rose how it goes I think of my dad, now weak, now old. My mother is long dead. But my home family life, that home of Roswell that family–the concatenation of images sing sing through my mind faces and places and clothes. Private to me and to die with me as I die when that is. Thanks for having me over for dinner over & over, family of my youth & friends & family of friends. You are all gone now, except the fringe of what’s left. Dad, I hope you survive well this latest onset of age. May we renew ourselves by talking about the shared things in times passed.

Time has passed leaving those picnics in the backyard by the wishing well & clothesline & flowering yucca and gardens of my mother and all that ham & chicken & hamburgers & hotdogs and those iceberg lettuce salads with pale tomatoes and all those pies, apple, peach, lemon, chocolate & the memory fades.

Now my family is so oddball & strange and near and dear that it’s hard to talk about it to my dad. Are they married? he asks You have a granddaughter? I have to remind him, families are thoroughly different and were long before this new century– We didn’t have a picnic but we ate out at the Range blue corn chicken enchiladas red chile, green chile chef’s salad, ice tea, bubblegum soda and little Lyra loved her salad, good green lettuce & good red tomato & took her chicken fingers home and this is as good as we ever can do. My son & I went to Easter Sunday church together– it just happened, against my will. But when I was a kid, it was common practice. I remember I was baptized on Easter Sunday. Now, anything of the old memories that allows me to live them again is a reminder, it doesn’t all die. I think, I thank, give out love as best I can. To live in the resurrection of the moment.

Larry Goodell

Photograph is from about '52, our backyard, Roswell, New Mexico, one of our frequent family picnics . . If you'd like to see a bundle of my Spring Poems including links to recordings of my reading most of them, plus a new poem called "Goddess of the Big Bang," simply go here. This poem came to life in 2000.

Happy Spring, Easter, day of Eostre to all! Send submissions to poetheart2@gmail.com

You sum this experience up so well in these lines, Larry -- I realize you rever it. I do, too, with my own, and realize the fragility of the passing on of values, traits, ... hanging on these slim generations. So, we talk about it - write a poem and share it - and it can pass on.