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Saturday morning readers share:
Mary Alice Dixon
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A Triptych on the First Anniversary of My Mother’s Death
in memory of Dorothy Eloise Royal Luke
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1.
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What’s heaven like? Mama asked three weeks
before she died. She was sitting
on a red couch, frail, her eyes closed.
Light through the picture window
streaked her white hair gold.
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I recalled tales of paved streets and pearly gates,
said, I don’t know, but it must be . . .
wonderful, full of love.
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Earth’s pretty wonderful too, she replied.
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2.
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Mama had come from the womb of a cripple—
a miracle, declared spinster aunts who asked
for the child, if it lived, but predicted the death of both.
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How my grandmother, felled by a stroke when her belly
was ripe, gave birth and then lived thirty years
to see me born is a mystery. Rocking on the front porch
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to ease her pain, Grandma would fret over her yard,
then rise, hobble down the steps, dragging
a straw broom behind, and with one hand
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sweep the South Georgia sand, tracing patterns
that rose in her head, like lines drawn by Navajo
medicine men and Zen masters she never knew.
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Satisfied, winded from her work, she would limp
back up the stairs, collapse into her chair
and dare anyone to desecrate the designs.
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Whenever Mama was upset she’d bake cakes,
swirling divinity icing into patterns
reminiscent of her mother’s swept sand yard.
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2.
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The night she died, kin and caregivers
surrounded her bed, recited the twenty-third
psalm to bid her farewell.
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We dressed her corpse in a blue nightgown,
sang gospel songs, lowered
the coffin into the ground.
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3.
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Sun strikes the bench where I sit staring
at winter grass that carpets her grave,
dates etched in marble’s blue veins.
A sandpiper prances nearby.
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Love blankets me, just as it covered Mama
the night she left her body for us to bury, just as
it warmed my grandmother when she edged
toward death . . . then returned to bear life.
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Karen Luke Jackson
from Broad River Review, April 2013, Winner of the 2012 Ron Rash Poetry Award
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One of the things I love most about Karen Luke Jackson’s poem—and all of her work—is how she sees sacred incarnate in people, places, and things. In this poem commemorating the anniversary of her mother’s death, Karen paints visions. She makes a portrait, a Vermeer in words. When Karen tells us how “Light through the picture window/sheathed her hair with gold…” we see Karen’s dying mother haloed in sun. Then, after the hair with gold light comes the image of the pearly gates. And a weaving of mother, grandmother, and daughter. Next, the mother’s corpse in its blue nightgown goes home to earth. Finally, at the gravesite, “Love blankets me” the poet tells us, as it covered her mother and returned her grandmother from a crippling stroke “to bear life.” In the end, life has the last word. I see in the mother’s grave the cakes she baked, as Karen tells us, “swirling divinity icing into patterns….” We taste a slice of heaven offered on a earthenware plate.
Mary Alice Dixon
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❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀
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How My Father Decides He Wants a Green Burial
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blight sickens
the flowering dogwood
on whose silver gray branches
my father watches birds
from his death bed
gazing through the glass
speaking to sparrows
in silent psalms in a tongue
only those with wings
could hear
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he calls these creatures angels
with claws
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in morning shadows
the ghost
of the dogwood’s last spring
paints memories of heartwood
on the ground
where the woundwort grows
where the earth
is already beginning
to break open
letting my father’s clawed angels
nest in worm-rich dirt
feathered
with birch bark and pinestraw
finding a haven
my father calls his next home
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when he dies I hear
sparrows speak
with the voice of my father
in flower
in woundwort and weeds
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Mary Alice Dixon
first published in Soul Forte: A Journal for Spiritiual Writing, Issue 12, 2025.
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Mary Surprised by a Sparrow
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Something (actually a couple of things) about me:
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My dad, born 1911, worked in a steel mill to earn enough cash to pay for night school where he studied engineering. He was obsessed with aerodynamics, designing airplane wings that earned patents during WWII. But the wings he loved the most were angel wings. These he drew with mathematical precision in blueprints, measured meticulously. Had he seen angels? Why sure. Everybody knows birds are angels with claws. As he lay dying in a hospice bed in our house, Dad fell in love with sparrows. Who can miss the kinship of sparrows and St. Michael the Archangel? Certainly not my dad.
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Me? For the past 15 years I have volunteered with hospice. In the hospice grief writing workshops I facilitate I hand out feathers. And, of course, quote Emily Dickinson, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” One of my great joys is collecting fallen feathers and small stones. I write the word “hope” on the stones, then place stones and feathers on strangers’ gravesites. Anonymously, of course. Although I guess the cat is out of that bag now. The photo of me, mouth open? A sparrow surprised me at my window shortly after I dreamed of Dad rising from a bird’s nest in a dogwood tree. What can I say, I was raised on old-time religion and my favorite high school teacher was a nun who called God “The Big Bird”.
Mary Alice Dixon
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❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀
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