Ghost Pain

Sydney Lea

in memoriam Jim Kilgo

Murmured conversation like simmering water.
Happy looking clothes.
We’re easy to mock, and aren’t we hypocrites, you ask?
Nowhere does faith claim we’re not.
Hypocrisy comes with the territory:
being human. Roof and rafters and steeple snap.

It’s minus ten degrees out there,
for the love of Christ,
and it seems above all so safe inside,
safer even than home.
It seems home.
We’ve lit the half-blighted spruce by the road,

chattered our way through a tone-deaf carol,
repaired to our coffee and small talk.
Brian just wheeled in Joan.
We wish them all the cheer that humans can,
inquire how the leg is,
now that it’s gone.

Is there ghost pain?
Brave Joan and Brian kindle like matches.
It’s their anniversary, and they’re proud
of their grown daughter, who lately recited a poem,
a wonderful awful poem to a lost mother.
She’d found it on the Internet, she crowed

in her joy, "a brand new adventure."
She used it in tribute to Joan’s mother.
The hour was all about tribute, memory, loss:
we’d each brought a bulb for the tree;
we screwed them into waiting sockets on boughs,
light for parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts,

gone children and friends. Ghost pain.
Then we went in a crowd to the vestry,
Mary among us,
happy she could make her way in her walker
after the doctors put her knee back together.
Red stayed home with Agnes,

too sick with chemo to come.
We’d prayed for them,
for Willie who died wife- and childless,
for others, many others, saints and strangers.
We’re proud of our youngest daughter,
who performed "One Little Candle" at the start of the service:

she sings like an angel, but it’s the poise that stuns
her mother and me.
Why on earth did we cry?
A dear friend down south has gone;
his church’s prayer chain couldn’t hold him.
Not this time. People die.

The stars outdoors are sharp as razors,
and Orion the Hunter huge and bold above the river—
as if he could send an arrow flying right through us here.
All manner of things fly through the no-fly zone
elsewhere, the homeless huddle under cardboard,
all the brutal rest, and no, since you inquire,

we can’t account for it. It’s Pearl Harbor Day,
hours of light down to nine, to fewer.
If God be for me, whom then shall I fear?
Easy enough to say, the mockers might say, from in here.
I might be out there among them
were the world not served,

we have to believe, in there being
one more safe tiny place amid the great unsafe.
The girl sang well, enough to bring tears.
A small voice got big, rose over the pain.
And thus did Mary trudge in,
and Joan roll in on her chair,

and Red and Agnes and Willie figure thus in our prayers,
and the only miracle for this lonely minute:
we were inside,
even those who weren’t, who aren’t, who can’t be.
And the wind that blows no good—
It’s outside.

And the cookies are good, and the coffee.
By God aren’t they good?

Visit Sydney Lea as Image Artist of the Month for July '07

Issue #41• Winter '03-'04