Passing On - Oct 25 2020

 

Passing On

Oct 25 2020

My mother couldn't resist a sale.

You can't afford the savings, I'd say,

but to her

the deal was all that mattered;

free stuff,

the smug delight

of something for nothing

whatever it was.

A child of the Depression

she was weaned on frugality.

Nothing wasted, no indulgences.

They say trauma is passed on

to the next generation,

how we are raised in it

how our genes are changed.

Children of austerity

and children of war.

Of the Holocaust

alcohol, poverty, divorce.

Even children of wealth,

who can't help but bear

either guilt

or entitlement.

And the sins of the fathers

passed on in mother's milk.

I much prefer frugal to cheap,

the one sounding virtuous

the other mean.

Yet the older I get

I understand this as philosophy.

All the possessions I used to care about

I've become indifferent to;

the material goods

that no longer matter

however fantastic the steal.

The great leveller

of the end of life

is my perspective now.

When all I'll want

will be less than I can carry;

the usual stuff

of sentimental value,

some objects of beauty

I can't live without.

And in the unlikely event of an afterlife

whatever poem I may have in mind

to accompany me

on my final journey,

a simple something

to lighten my burden

instead of the baggage that weighs me down.

A frugal poem

of a few well chosen words

I can safely pass on

to any future self.

Just imagine,

coming to life as a blank slate

instead of freighted down by the past.

I was reading a poem by Natasha Trethewey that centred on her relationship with her father. I think I had in mind this idea of parental influence when I began this poem, and the narrative emerged as this theme intersected with something I had thought about just before sitting down at the laptop: how, at this stage of life and preoccupied by other more urgent priorities involving health and diminished ability, I felt myself utterly indifferent to the importance of material possessions.

Oddly, before setting down the first line, I had thrown out a completely different poem that was going to begin with this first line: I am loath to write about death. Which is exactly where this poem ended up!

Or perhaps I could have written a simple “You can't take it with you” ...and left it at that!

My Father as Cartographer

Natasha Trethewey

In dim light now, his eyes

straining to survey

the territory: here is the country

of Loss, its colony Grief;

the great continent Desire

and its borderland Regret;

vast, unfathomable water

an archipelago—the tiny islands

of Joy, untethered, set adrift.

At the bottom of the map

his legend and cartouche,

the measures of distance, key

to the symbols marking each

known land. What’s missing

is the traveller’s warning

at the margins: a dragon—

its serpentine signature—monstrous

as a two-faced daughter.