"Not Without Hope We Suffer And Mourn . . ."
— W. Wordsworth, Elegaic Stanzas

And now sweet sister who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name
In that glowing, burning bright mystical world of flowing gowns and flowers
like daises daffodils crying white baby’s breath in your golden hair

I remember how you stood stand still on that wooden fence mooing at cows
and wanting to feed the rabbits
but you were too young to tend them,
but not too young to play

As I got back from out there with my twelve year-old leather boots
damp and brown from the dew which lay on the grass and reeds from around the pond which held those fistsized tadpoles and crocodiles
and caked with the mud from the stys of the pigs and cattle

And I saw you pointing at the clouds with that small little pink nailed finger of that hand
which I can remember grasping my thumb as I walked you away from that yellow kitchen where it all was ending in a violent hurling
of words and pans and pots

And it was only first beginning —
for all those you left behind those ten years ago on that September’s day as we played in the cold splashing blue and white water
and you in the house in that yellow kitchen as mother sang merrily
– for once in what seemed to have been a million years
– and made lunches

And that sister who was then so young
with her brown, dead tooth in her so innocent and ageless smile
and I and father played in the shallow pool as you so stealthily,
under the cover of the laughter coming so easily out of me and Roo,
forced then by father for his knowledge of our impending demise,
tried to come to us —
in our oblivion.

He had asked me at age nine
in a talk over beer and hot chocolate
in a dark and smoky bar somewhere
of my knowledge, of my premonition of the future,
which was then so bright under the innocence of youth
and ignorance of the pain between two people who,
sixteen years before,
then,
had fallen in love.

It was a foreshadowing of that which was to fall.

And I,
later while he held my hand in Amsterdam,
was lied to about the ladies in the window.

And you tired to surprise us,
join in our fun,
as if you knew it was to end soon
and wanted to be a part of it one last time.

And I remember those glasses of wine sitting on the table
while we ate
with you on the floor with a glass for yourself

and us lost within our own cosmos of gaiety and masquerades,
each of us hiding behind masks and blows of either ignorance or fright

And how you in your little body
not yet out of diapers
laughed it up while still hardly able to walk
and fell down so less able to move at all
after your moments of private fun and attempts at grown life —
as some sort of jester in our world of facades.

And I remember that time I cried those salt hot tears into my pillow and screamed at the plastered wall, amber and black in shadow, after running from that yellow kitchen and the pots and pans screaming and you pushed open the door and crawled up onto my bed in that cold desolate room and laid your precious head upon my shoulder as I laid face down and cried.

and how days later it was you and me playing in that bed as the parents were somewhere else sharpening their knives, briefing their armies; and sister was somewhere else playing make-believe in a world which no longer existed; and it was me in my shorts with no hair yet on my legs and you had taken off your diaper and we played and laughed and jumped and danced and tickled each other until

you were taken away.

"Fear Death By Water . . ."
— T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland