Loving the Dead

Four years ago around now I made a visa run out of Ukraine and got to spend the weekend in southern Poland exploring Krakow and Częstochowa. I got to see some really neat stuff, but one of the most endearing and enduring memories I have is of leaving the little chapel in Krakow where I'd gone for an early All Saints/Sunday Mass and seeing how many people were already in the adjacent cemetery on that sunny, cold fall morning to visit the graves of their loved ones, many of them not only bringing flowers, but even picnic baskets so that they could share some time together as a family, both living and dead. It was such a profoundly moving and beautiful thing, and now whenever these three days of Halloween (All Hallows Eve), All Saints, and All Souls roll around I can't help thinking of that cold morning in Krakow and the warmth of those people's love. I hope we all are blessed to have such enduring love in our lives!

"When The Lamp Is Shattered"

When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead -
When the cloud is scattered,
The rainbow's glory is shed.
When the lute is broken,
Sweet tones are remembered not;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot.

As music and splendour
Survive not the lamp and the lute,
The heart's echoes render
No song when the spirit is mute -
No song but sad dirges,
Like the wind through a ruined cell,
Or the mournful surges
That ring the dead seaman's knell.

When hearts have once mingled,
Love first leaves the well-built nest;
The weak one is singled
To endure what it once possessed.
O Love! who bewailest
The frailty of all things here,
Why choose you the frailest
For your cradle, your home, and your bier?

Its passions will rock thee,
As the storms rock the ravens on high;
Bright reason will mock thee,
Like the sun from a wintry sky.
From thy nest every rafter
Will rot, and thine eagle home
Leave thee naked to laughter,
When leaves fall and cold winds come.

A poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

"The Shadow on the Stone"

I went by the Druid stone
That broods in the garden white and lone,
And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows
That at some moments fall thereon
From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,
And they shaped in my imagining
To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders
Threw there when she was gardening.

I thought her behind my back,
Yea, her I long had learned to lack,
And I said: ‘I am sure you are standing behind me,
Though how do you get into this old track?’
And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf
As a sad response; and to keep down grief
I would not turn my head to discover
That there was nothing in my belief.

Yet I wanted to look and see
That nobody stood at the back of me;
But I thought once more: ‘Nay, I’ll not unvision
A shape which, somehow, there may be.’
So I went on softly from the glade,
And left her behind me throwing her shade,
As she were indeed an apparition -
My head unturned lest my dream should fade.

A poem by Thomas Hardy. Pictured is one of the haunting sculptures from the Holocaust Memorial in Washington Park, Portland.