Remembering the Veterans and active enlisted with a heavy heart yesterday and today. My motto daily is, do it, for life is too short not to. "LITSNT"

The Place in the Shade Mother’s Day 5-10-08 DGG

Looking for a place in the shade,
we pile out of the cars
into the hazy, flat, noon sunlight.

I scan for our place among the confetti
of families dappling the grassy fields,
with bunches of children, umbrellas, chairs and blankets.

Between the flowers we search,
measuring a pace
across a stone-cobbled path,
Where the trees are sparsely scattered.

“They must be here.”
as we gaze,
Suddenly someone familiar appears:
A grandfather, a grandmother, an uncle, a cousin, a spouse, a youth:

Robert Lasher, senior: only familiar
grandfather who passed in old age
Cecil Lasher: grandmother
and first matriarch to pass from my memory
Robert Lasher, junior: first uncle
who passed in senior years
Dennis Casey: first cousin to pass
in young adulthood
Dennis Turner, the first cousin’s spouse
lost in middle adulthood
And his son, Mark Turner: first of the great-grandchildren
to be lost in great despair.

We absently calculate
dates from the start to the end
to find the difference of their lives…

while the last matriarch
patiently
leafs through the decades
to tell us
of their sums.

We leave with a matriarch
of the next generation,
and we have seen the place with the shade.