One of the first full collections of poetry I ever remember reading (as opposed to single poems, or poems in anthologies), is Eunice de Souza's Women in Dutch Painting - a book that is now out of print and can't be had for love or money, though most poems from it are to be found in A Necklace of Skulls (assuming that is still in print).
Someone had gifted my mother a copy, and its nearly-plain brown cover with the title seemed friendly. The poems were short, as all of de Souza's poems are but I realised very quickly that they packed a punch.
Looking over that collection this morning while thinking up a column and remembering a person I knew in school who'd disappeared, I found this poem and it seemed fortuitous.
She and I
by Eunice de Souza
Perhaps he never died.
We've mourned him separately,
in silence,
she and I.
Suddenly, at seventy-eight,
she tells me his jokes,
his stories, the names of
paintings he loved,
and of some forgotten place
where blue flowers fell.
I am afraid
for her, for myself,
but can say nothing.
Someone had gifted my mother a copy, and its nearly-plain brown cover with the title seemed friendly. The poems were short, as all of de Souza's poems are but I realised very quickly that they packed a punch.
Looking over that collection this morning while thinking up a column and remembering a person I knew in school who'd disappeared, I found this poem and it seemed fortuitous.
She and I
by Eunice de Souza
Perhaps he never died.
We've mourned him separately,
in silence,
she and I.
Suddenly, at seventy-eight,
she tells me his jokes,
his stories, the names of
paintings he loved,
and of some forgotten place
where blue flowers fell.
I am afraid
for her, for myself,
but can say nothing.
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