Excerpt

On The Death Of Love And Other Poems

By

Louise Hart

Published by:

© 2001 By Author. All Rights Reserved

Introduction

On the Death of Love and other poems is the sixth volume of poetry by poet, author and photojournalist Louise Hart. Her other poetic works include her photographically illustrated metaphysical collections, The Illustrated Book of Trees and Book of Trees II; her narrative and haunting look at life in the inner city, Tales of a City Maid; her historical biography of five generations of Lowell Mill girls, Mill Girls and their Daughters and her multimedia, nondenominational prayer poems, Prayers for the Temple Within.

In this short volume, with dramatic imagery drawn from our lives and history, the poet looks at our emotions and interpersonal relations and how we relate or fail to relate to one another. Again and again, through each succeeding poem, emotions and relationships are turned like gems in our hands until many of their facets have been explored. As in Tales, no subject or image is taboo. Tragedy and tranquility each have their moments as do humor, loneliness and fear. The poet looks at prisoners, the dying, parents, children, war, graveyards, nature and bureaucracies. All help us define who and what we are. The hermit is never alone and cannot hide from the voice within. Those in the care of others feel isolated and alone. Through storms and seasons, nature confronts us, shows us her awesome power and mentors us even as she threatens our very existence. Human emotions can be as fearsome, deadly and out of control as any storm. We take hope with us to the grave and can have it as indifferently destroyed then as when we are alive. We vex ourselves with the systems we create. There are lessons and truth here for all readers to discern and incorporate in their lives. Not all need to be lived or known personally for us to take meaning from them just as we do not all need to be farmers to eat the fruits of the land.

About the Author

Poet, author and photojournalist Louise Hart began writing when she was five years of age, was first published at thirteen and currently counts five volumes of poetry among her twenty or more books in publication.

Dubbed the "new Emily Dickinson" by the editor of a prestigious imagistic poetry journal, she would later also be named Poet Laureate of Greater Lawrence, the hometown of Robert Frost. The images in her metaphysical poems and stories are drawn from the rich New England heritage and environment which has been home to her family for four-hundred years.

A graduate of Boston University, the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and Harvard, she completed the Institute in Economic and Urban Development at Tufts University in Medford, MA and attended law school.

A prolific, talented writer, her published works encompass all genre including fiction, non-fiction, humor, children’s and cookbooks.

Table of Contents

On the Death of Love

The Roommates

Echoing Whispers

A Photograph in a Family Album

The Guest

A Mother’s Look at Beirut

Lebanon: A Mother’s Perspective

To Our Dead in Saudi Arabia

Paris, Moscow, Sarajevo, Tehran

Memorial Flags

Bureaucratic Notes

Transitions

Spring Teasers

Backyard Gardener

Soul Healer of Thyself

Hieroglyphics

Raging Storm

Beyond Childhood Years

Trick or Treat

Okalahoma

Attic Treasures

Fireflies

To Frank

Mourning Dreams

A Family’s Marker Overturned

Darkened Days

Depression

The Hermit’s Companion

The Night the Lights Went Out

Dream Sentries

The Pleasures of Spring

Anticipation

If Love Could Stay

Ponderings

On the Death of Love

It was not that words hitting as hard as or

Stinging as harsh as freezing rain, sleet or hail

Pelted upon my soul, they did not.

Instead, there was silence, deadly eye of storm

Quiet, stillness, artificial hesitation, tense

Lack of action, questions seeking answers

And direction, decisions suspended like

Breath withheld with no autonomic response,

No instinctive gulp of life-saving air.

What was not said, done, acted upon, layered

Like one dry ice-suffocating blanket

Upon another and another. None was aware

Of the other. No purposeful, decisive movement,

Flow, current, undertow, conscious or

Unconscious force was evident or controlled.

Feelings fell as neatly as mounting, soft

Snowflakes that fall unheard in the night,

Euthanized martyrs motivated by primal forces,

Newton‘s law, gravity controls and is obeyed.

Individuality, will are not present, do not

Change, alter or impact the resultant scene.

Uninvolved observers perceive uniqueness,

Experience momentary beauty apart

From the scientific explanations, intellectual

Considerations, understandings of physics,

Meteorology or aesthetics. Science and

Philosophy are not determinant, do not add

Or detract from the existential is.

The perceived formations of falling snow

Bring reminders of the showers that fell upon

The unsuspecting victims of Auschwitz

Lined up outside de-lousing chambers.

They had no way to know the dreams, hope,

Remnants of life force, consciousness snuffed

Out, incinerated, reduced to nothingness,

Unrecognizable by them as they stood half-naked,

Shivering from exposure, starvation, fear,

Seeking refuge only from the cold,

Touched inhumanely now by brethren,

Forerunners, others no different than they,

Reduced to layers of ash, snowflakes

That uniformly, indifferently and indiscriminately,

Drafted, drawn, channeled up on lightened air

To be spewed out in sky darkening,

Seemingly pollution chimney smoke,

Bits, pieces showered upon them,

Covering, robbing all warmth and color,

Blanketing the landscape, foreclosing,

Shutting out, walling up, barring rescue,

Resuscitation, revitalization and recovery.

When the doors opened, on direction

From armed guards and fellow prisoners,

They filed in while others took their places.

The debris that now falls is colder,

It stings like the cinders of those lives

As it touches, chills exposed flesh.

Flush red freezes, dilutes, pales pink

As encroaching, creeping, narcotizing

Necrotic gray, blue, white, absence

Of color, hue, movement markers,

Signs of life, love, emotion and reaction depart.

The Roommates

Two heavy-set men dressed in white

Wheeled the litter carrying Hattie

Into a white-walled room where

Four white-cotton blanketed beds

On which three semi-conscious,

Shrinking shadows lay. Suppressed

Moans hummed their greeting,

Their welcome to a roommate

Most would never even speak to,

Or live to know her name.

Hattie’s litter was parked next

To the empty bed where only hours

Before Julia had quietly slipped away.

Curled in fetal position, stroke

Silenced, paralyzed and semi-comatose

Julia died just before dawn. No one

Knew for certain. She passed like a tree

In the forest that falls unobserved

Except by its fellow sentient beings.

No one sounded an alarm, buzzed,

Cried out, spoke a word. All of her roommates

Except Georgia, slept as her spirit passed

Above them, through the window and away.

Georgia watched in silence, waved

Frail bony fingers then turned her head away.

The nurses marked her death time as

Just before dawn. That seemed consistent

With the statistics published in the

Geriatric journals that lay on their desks

To be read during quiet, late night shifts.

When Julia died, they were not by

Her side, holding her hand, taking

Vitals or even aware. No one rang.

That night, like so many others,

They fought boredom by playing cards,

Grumbling at a rare, impatient buzzer

that dared interrupt their game.

An aide from the next shift found Julia

While taking pulses and vitals

For the morning charts, routine

Preparations for doctors’ morning rounds.

As soon as the doctor officially pronounced,

Signed the death certificate, gave the release

Julia’s body was placed on a litter

And wheeled to the basement morgue

To await transfer to a crematorium.

The bed was remade just before Hattie came.

Georgia saw it all from the neighboring bed.

She grabbed the steel rails at her side,

Turned her head and whispered greetings

To Hattie in a language all her own.

Her solo heard above the chorus of moans.

Before Hattie could respond, the nurse came,

Drew the curtain and told Hattie

To ignore Georgia with her wrinkled bandana

Over her straight wisps of yellowed white hair

And her gurgling noises no nurse understood.

Hattie couldn’t, for she knew

That this frail, bony-faced woman

Whose handsomeness was long ago buried

Under swelling waves of wrinkles and time

Would share a communal vigil

Until death parted them.

After the nurse finished puffing her pillow

And tucking in the thin woven blanket cover,

She drew back the curtain and left.

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