Author: carmenbugan

Holy Communion

                   For my parents

The priest gathered us under the cross

In our living room, parents seated,

Children kneeling. The book opened,

The words of old prayers flew about

Like freed doves, trained to return home.

*

We don’t know if my brother opened

The last bottle of wine, or if I protested

Dad’s dying one last time, when I offered

The glass of red instead of the morphine,

Because, for God’s sake, we’ll do this right.

Mom and my sister nursed dad through

The small hours, talking softly about

What will happen to all of us scattered

Too far from home. Dad told us to plant

A row of fruit trees, fix the writers’ shed.

*

It’s Sunday morning. The sun rises

In the autumn-burned trees, above our church.

The priest alone waits for us with holy oil,

Holy wine, incense, prayers, and songs.

My brother, my sister and I walk through

The door. We light three candles. Our faces

Are reflected in the face of Christ glowing

In the icon lit by stained-glass-windows-sunrise.

The priest calls us to the altar, where we

Drink the tiny spoon of wine. Peace.

*

I walk alone to the room I filled with flowers

Nearly seventeen years ago, preparing

For my wedding. The mind has a way

Of layering parts of our lives, so that dying

Father, lost marriage, and those August roses

Reflect each other in the memory of icons

I kiss this morning. My father’s cold hands

Are in mine: “Bravo” he says

When I kiss him all over his face, “Bravo”.

“I’ll stay a little longer,” he says, “you fly home”.

Grand River is covered in a fog that glows

In the growing morning. Maples emerge

Candle-like orange through dewy ribbons

Above the fogged-over water. And I take flight

Through the thick cloud, up towards the sun.

Sunday, 16 October 2022

I suppose there are unplanted gardens in all of us. Neglected spaces. Parts of the soul lying fallow. Stores of seeds forgotten in memory. Dreams of clearings. Fresh earth, smelling both like graves and like renewing grass, wild meadows.

I look forward to teaching for the IWWG this July:

https://iwwg.wildapricot.org/conf2022_virtual

My life laid bare through secret police files

You sign your full name with a stick on the freshly poured

Path of cement: the end of the last letter returns to

your first name In the wet dust. Around, a slew of peonies

Hurry to bloom before the bluebells, before you plant them.

You surprise me with dill seeds from Grandmother

That you kept since our last trip home.

You brought her in this soil and now we are together

Through plants we touched in different countries.

Remember? A cart full of red and white grapes at the head

Of our vineyard, red wine pressed years before,

Goat’s cheese and tomatoes spread under the oak tree

And horses let loose for children whose voices ripened the earth.

*

I have the picture in which you crossed yourself in front of St Mary’s icon at Vatra.

 It was the first week of chemotherapy when we had the service with

Seven candles and seven prayers and seven readings from the Gospels.

Seven times we walked to the altar where the priest painted crosses with holy oil

On our cheeks, on our foreheads, and the backs of our hands.  For we must sin

With our minds, hurt others with our hands, and carry our shame on our faces.

So we try to redeem ourselves with our minds, and hands, and clean our cheeks.

I look at your pale profile, at your balding head in front of those candles

And ask what the mother in red and her child in white,

carefully placed In the whitest of wood frames, will do for you.

We cried with you: Mother, I, and a congregation of exiles

Dreaming their own into the smoke of the censer.

*

We are small gardens in strange places, small voices –

Prayers weakening with age and heavy accents hammering wrong syllables:

Does God understand us in English or our own language still?

You choose the path with handwriting that marks your name and year

And I carry your garden in my head, along with the memory of you and Mother

Embracing on the doorstep the day we received the news:

In the months to come what binds us is the most silent of prayers, unuttered still.

Here is a poet who deserves praise!

https://pulp.aadl.org/node/584467

By now even the faith has got it wrong,

The Patriarch held hands with the invader

And praised the unjust war, with crossed candles.

The faithful broke ranks, the filigreed eggs

Sat in baskets like stones, the sweet bread

Laid on the table like a closed book.

And us, aghast at what love means

In different homes, to different people,

Unable to choose a place to pray,

Except God’s true garden: the forests,

And the sea marshes where perfect

Great white herons dance in pairs

Just above our heads, their sinewy necks

Above still water: love in mirrors—free,

Wild, calling out the pink crab apple blooms.

The dwarf pines send forth long cones,

An offering of candles lit by the sun.

Christ rises on great heron’s wings.

in the still sea:

a peony blooming 

above golden sand.

When she stretches 

In the water’s glow

she names my yearning 

Ides of March 2022

Waves of the sea

in snowy wind:

manes of mares

white and restless—

inspiriting fury

of leaving winter.

March 12, 2022