On Holy Saturday, Poems of Remembrance by Dana Gioia

Good Friday at St. James Marietta, image by Android from a photo by choir director Bryan Black.

It's fitting that a cold steady rain falls in Atlanta on this day of the church's ancient calendar, a time of mourning Christ's death before the Easter morning. Also fitting is the set of poems I happened upon today when I turned the page to Part III of Dana Gioia's 99 Poems, called "Remembrance."

Gioia gives the section its own dedication "To the memory of my first son" with the boy's name and this phrase, Briefest of joys, our life together. That, and the day, primed me to receive all of the poems in this section as ones to cherish.

To the keeper of the small gate who is both jeweller of the spider-web and blade of lightning harvesting the sky -- a thrilling allusion to the Grim Reaper -- Gioia writes this "Prayer": I will see you soon enough...but until then I pray, watch over him as a falcon over its flightless young. Gioia's free translation of "The Song" by Maria Rilke includes the phrase from the dedication and this amazing thought, that all that ever touched us -- you and me -- touched us together like a bow / that from two strings could draw one voice. Gioia comes at grief obliquely and all the more strongly for it in poems about a March blizzard and about myths where humans escaped the whims of gods by metaphorphoses.

In some of the poems, grief is expressed as liturgy, and sometimes in what I would call a sacramental rite -- outward and visible signs of an invisible reality. Gioia tells us of a Sicilian tradition that a father plants a tree in thanksgiving for a first son. But in "Planting a Sequoia" the poet and his brother bury a lock of hair, a piece of an infant's birth cord with the roots of the tree which he hopes will stand long past his own life. In "Pentecost," the grieving father tells the grieving mother, amid their sleepless nights and the morning's ache for dream's illusion that We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost.... "Litany" is a prayer to unbelief / to candles guttering and darkness undivided, / to incense drifting into emptiness.

Few of the poems relate explicitly to the boy in the dedication, and many of the poems honor others. "Night Watch" remembers an uncle, merchant marine, so much of his life passing between continents. At "The Veterans' Cemetery" The afternoon's a single thread of light / sewn through the tatters of a leafless willow. A short poem observes So much of what we live goes on inside and our tongue-tied aches / Of unacknowledged love are no less real / For having passed unsaid. Gioia imagines what he would write to long-gone loved ones in "Finding a Box of Family Letters."

There's a startling moment when he shares haunting and touching memories of terminally ill children and their parents from "Special Treatments Ward." He was there with another son. There, the doctors are like "oracles" who pass in and out. We need to talk, though talking breaks our hearts. Then Gioia tells the reader directly that he put this poem aside for 12 years because he wanted not to remember: I'd lost one child and couldn't bear to watch another die. But he's haunted by the ones he left behind when his son recovered.

He reaches accommodation with his feelings in "Majority." Having observed milestones reached by boys born the same year as his first son, he recognizes at 21 years that it's time for the son to move on.

I'm so glad that I discovered this set of poems today when I needed it.