MN Poetry: Deborah Gordon Cooper’s “Visitations”
Poetry has a unique power to comfort in times of loss. And it's that power that inspired Jim Perlman at Holy Cow! Press to assemble an anthology of poems about losing a loved one. The result, "Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude," is a compelling tome, filled with not only great Minnesota poets, but also Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Jane Kenyon and Pablo Neruda, just to name a few. Here's a poem by Deborah Gordon Cooper, one of the co-editors of the anthology:
Visitations
On Tuesday
in the produce aisle,
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choosing my oranges by feel
and by their fragrance,
I hear my father
whistling in my ear.
A Scottish lullaby.
Everything else stops.
There is a tenderness no border can contain.
A web that may be glimpsed
in certain, unexpected plays of light,
or felt
like a shawl
across one's shoulders
laid by unseen hands.
There are sounds in other decibels
the heart can hear
when the wind is right
and the mind has quieted its clicking.
The border guards are sleeping
at their stations.
Spirits come and go.
The wall between the living and the dead
is as yielding as a membrane,
is as porous as a skin.
Lay your palm against it
and you can hear their voices
in your hand
and in the place where the chest opens
like a flower.
They are not far away,
no farther than the breath,
and enter us as easily,
in pine and peonies,
in oranges and rain.
- "Visitations," by Deborah Gordon Cooper, as it appears in the anthology Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude, published by Holy Cow! Press. Reprinted here with permission from the publisher.