Poem Interlude

I'm crossing Under the BQE tomorrow to head back to Illinois for a few days to visit the fam. A year ago today, my grandmother died, and I was about to fly home for the funeral, where I felt like a part of me was going to be buried too. I'm swimming back into my journal from those days, and I found this entry, which gives me hope now, at a time when hope and mourning and love are all tangled up again:

7/6/2007: There was something very practical about Grandma. I can hear her saying that death must happen and asking me questions about my life to distract me from tears."

The next day I wrote about my grandfather, my favorite person in the universe:

Sometimes my heart feels bigger than my whole body.

And here's a poem I wrote on 7/7/2007, the day I flew back to New York, and the date, this year, when I will fly back to New York again.

Untitled (July 7, 2007)

We make such a slight shadow, flying
over Illinois fields, roads, farms like Swiss dots, lives stretching
beyond sight into haze. Over cemeteries,
too, our wings make such a slight shadow, faint
as a white monogram on a white
handkerchief. Clouds cast bigger shadows, and,
slipping amongst them, we lose ours completely,
such as it was, barely a finger
of shadow brushing the face of the earth.