repost number four: little discoveries.

from May 2009:

[I'm here in Shreveport at my dad's house for a spell, taking a break from work (post-comps, pre-diss bliss) and helping him clear some closets and boxes, odds and ends. I've been charged with sorting through roughly 100 years of family memorabilia--everything from photos to newspaper clippings to my grandmother's "novel" (don't ask). Some interesting finds:

--A third-grade project of mine entitled "Women Nurses in the Civil War," for which I even provided illustrations. I guess even then I knew where I was headed.

--Notes that my maternal grandmother Azile and my grandfather James left each other all over their own house when they were angry with one another. My mom always insisted that this happened. Now I have proof. Passive-aggressive fodder from the 1950s. Love it.

--My mom's freshman sociology paper entitled simply "Autobiography," within which she reveals that: she lusted after a photographer on her high school newspaper staff, she joined ROTC to impress another boy, and she felt as though she was afraid of committment because of her parents' marital issues. Gee...I wonder where I get my neuroses?

--Photos of my father as a teeny blond baby, all blurry and faded.

But yesterday's find was most emotional. Now, I've always known that my mom wrote poetry. I have several folders of her poems already, most of them typed because she sent a few out for publication. But what I discovered were new ones, not typed, but hurriedly scrawled on notebook paper, some of them almost unreadable. Coffee rings on some of them, which as my sister Joan well knows, was the "mark" of our household growing up. Coffee stains everywhere. My mother's handwriting was so loopy, so distinctive, that sometimes the sight of it is all it takes to tempt the tears from me. She used to leave notes for me in the mornings before school. I wish I still had those too.

All that said, here are a few gems. Her poems are really raw, really aching. She and I shared a love of the written word; for me, it's manifested in my love of scholarship and essaying and my quests to write about PEOPLE in interesting ways. For her, though, it was all about this raw emotion that spilled out in poetry.

[some (new even to me) poetry from Janis J. Reed]

"Anchor Heart"

And how I often glanced up
And realized the bounty
Riding the scene of it
Bypassing the glory
Remember, my love, before the seeds shelter
Pleasing to your memory
My love is pure of deceit
Gathering in your moroseness
You are ailing rather quickly
"untitled"
I thought I saw you on a dream
A peaked light
deep in my slumber
water rolled
and my solitude glowed
It was not really you, though
but your soul-print was discernible
and your purity rose in your demise

"6/20/99--embers"

If your stayed further away
than just your eyes can know
a Passion--
Glowing and ember like
Would decide your fate
If you died
I could still remember
Blessings, tiny songs sung on the night
as if you were mine again