Poem Written on Mother's Day

David

They told me on a Friday
You were dead
And Daddy was away
And didn't know to come right away
And my friend gave me lilies
Because what was there to say?

For a week I carried you
Still, heavy, silent
A breathing tomb

I birthed you on Good Friday morning
Held you in the hollow of my hand
Tiny, formed, delicate, alabaster

They told me we could bury you
So Tuesday we did
Paper shroud, cardboard coffin
Mommy's letter in a bottle

My baby
Who lived in my hope
But died in my body
Who lived in my heart
But never in my arms

I planted a lilac to remember you by
I had to leave you and the letter and the lilac behind

On Fragility and Anonymity

Last night, watching my husband stand up to put a DVD into the player, I had one of those odd moments where I feel somehow detached from the immediate present and float out into some sort of external view of things. So at the same time as seeing the vitality of him, his beautiful physique, his obvious strength, I was struck by his terrible fragility - at how easily even a strong, healthy body like his can so easily be broken or break down. How very precarious life is.

And I was once again aware of how tiny, in the greater scheme of things, a single human life is. Here is this person, precious beyond belief to me, and significant in his way to us, his family and friends, to those he works with and to those who seek his advice. But we too, are small unknowns, and once he's gone, his memory is unlikely to last much beyond a name and maybe a few small anecdotes after a few generations.

It seems more than a little sad.

I understand the almost frenzied efforts of many for just a little fame. It does seem hard to live with the idea of a life hard-lived, with so much effort and care and struggle and achievement, vanishing from consciousness so quickly.

But as I think back to the tiny percentage of humans whose names are attached to achievements great enough to keep them in human consciousness for some time I see how the their significance is built on the unseen lives and actions of so many, many others. Shakespeare would not be known today if there were no-one then who loved his work enough to perform it and watch it, and if there were no-one in our age to love his work enough to continue to read it, publish it and perform it, or even just to talk about him. Even underneath that one has to see the role of his parents, even if just biologically, friends who supported him, the builders who built the homes where he lived and the theatres where his plays were performed. The list is endless. Some of those were significant enough in his life that without their contribution Shakespeare would have drifted into anonymity, as most of us do.

And so the whole of humanity takes on the form of a live organism with all the cells and organs working together. Occasionally their combined actions, historical and contemporary, reach some kind of critical mass that produces someone who benefits enough to produce something that launches them into either fame or notoriety.

There is potentially no insignificance in the lives of any of us. Insignificance is not the same as anonymity. And there is a enough of a difference between the two to make it worth the struggle to live a life well.