Sympathies to Professor EagleWoman

Wambdi WasteWin:
Hou koda. Toked yaun he? Uabida. Çia wowiyuBkiâ niye.
Colleen
(I apologize in advance for the crudity of my message.)

I would like to express my sincere sympathies to Professor Angelique EagleWoman whose mother passed away unexpectedly.

The following poem was written about the death of a brother, but I hope its message is appropriate and meaningful.


WHAT I HAVE TRIED TO SAY TO YOU

That there are ways to love the life you haven't had,
ways to forgive the one you have.
That while your brother wasn't killed
to test anyone,
his death is, somehow, allowed by the mystery
requiring our lives to have this
permanent pull at the middle.
Our lives are what they have been:
unrevisable, changed only in our responses,
if we are still ready, somehow, for the next day,
the next person, poem, chance, even prepared,
however unready, for the next death.
Can we permanently grieve the boy
without hating what has become of him?
What has become of him?
He has returned to mystery,
the same one that is our life,
mine and yours this morning,
the continuing shapes we never see
up there, this afternoon, tomorrow:
so he is already, ahead of time,
in everything we do. I feel it, often,
that I am living my life in part for him,
not permanently dead in us, but telling
how we'd rather he had lived than not.
Remember our game of listening in the park
to hear the woods fill up with sounds,
birds, mostly, from farther and farther away
the longer we listened. He seems now
especially to have listened,
raptly, eyes closed, as if to singing,
as if he were entering the song,
and like the way he usually walked
far ahead of us or far behind -
already gone to his own music.
When I think how long it is
since he has entered all silence,
it takes me by the heart to think
those sounds like light have stayed
in whatever we are left to be.
That songs we heard those days
are from the place he's gone away to,
a singing in the mysteries connecting us,
if we can stop and be quiet and listen.
(Easy, LSU Press, 1999)