Let yourself become living poetry.
~ Rumi
Poems, by Sarah Elizabeth Burns
True Love Never Dies
(For when I'm Dead)
Please come play at my grave site,
oh how I love annual parties
and now that I'm dead
this one most of all.
Let's celebrate all the things
we love in this life: family,
friends, romance, toasts, food,
laughter, nostalgia, memories,
everything, everything!
Let's talk about every single moment
I was alive and savor each one.
Bring a picnic and armfuls of flowers,
light candles, sing, chat,
tell stories, read poems,
look through photo albums, see my
many loved ones with me
when I was young and beautiful,
and here when I was old
and elegant, all my
grand babies in my lap.
Bring cold bottles of champagne
and hot chocolate in thermoses.
Laugh until you cry as you take
turns doing impersonations of me.
Snuggle children, hang out,
wrap yourselves in blankets,
be comfortable and happy.
Write in my commonplace book -
may there always be blank pages
for jotting notes, love letters, quotes
to add to our conversation into eternity.
Light more candles,
open more champagne
Stay all night long and please
come again next year.
~ Sarah Elizabeth Burns
Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor
Remember the time
we followed hand-printed signs
to buy live spot prawns
out of that fisherman’s garage?
At Heart O’ the Hills campsite
you twisted their heads off,
skewered them, grilled them,
and with your fingers
fed them, slick with butter,
to me.
The next morning we hiked
Hurricane Ridge, the
Olympics rolling at our feet,
begging us to come play
among marmots, lupine and
tow-headed babies.
Our madly-in-love-with-each-other-ness
and optimism in the future
after improbably finding
each other among
billions on this planet
made the day pulse
fragrant and
alive.
Laughing, blood zinging
in the twilight, we drove
down the mountain eager
to nestle in the ferns
beneath the flashing
marquee of stars.
My hand rested lightly
on the back of your neck
for a private performance of
Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor
blasting through the open
car windows, the music
sweeping magnificently
up the scale of the world,
this universe we were creating,
just as Sir Edward William
Elgar, 1st Baronet
pulled this grandiose concerto
out from that dark place
right after WWI
where it hadn’t existed
before.
I smile at you now
and go turn Elgar up
loud.
~ Sarah Elizabeth Burns
Sobremesa
From Bahia Blanca,
Graciela followed
her first husband
to Canada.
When his drinking
killed that love,
cousin Alicia advised
Don’t come back.
Argentina is a mess.
Go live your life.
Which is why we are now
gathered around the table,
a beloved old tradition,
long after finishing desayuno,
in her garden on
Vancouver Island.
Long-married
to my father-in-law,
Abu (as my children call her)
refills our coffee cups and
we talk of all the usual things:
relatives, friends, work,
travels, memories,
and love.
Always love.
My son runs around the table
with his pretend baseball bat
replaying hits, strikes
and home runs
in slow-motion.
Watch Abu! Watch this!
Watch, Mummy, watch.
Watch!
The baby sits in my lap
blowing raspberries
and interrupting us
with happy shrieks,
showing off her two teeth.
It is July.
A ruby-throated hummingbird
chases a rival.
A yellow-wingtailed butterfly
hovers nearby,
drinking her breakfast,
eavesdropping.
We have nowhere to be.
We have more to discuss.
We linger.
~ Sarah Elizabeth Burns
Evelyn All Brand New
Bringer of great happiness,
radiant little Evelyn
all brand new,
you chose a fragrant July evening
to arrive, rising to the world just
before the Super Moon,
illuminating this bright world
even more.
Add your light
to the sum of light,
wrote Leo Tolstoy (someone
you will want to read later and
we can discuss over tea and sugar
cookies). You have already
accomplished this in your first
hours, radiating joy
to all of us
who already love you
with the kind of love
perfectly impossible to quantify.
The light-heartedness you must
feel after the long journey, blinking
your brilliant eyes in the
sun of your first morning. As you
taste the air, touch your mother’s
skin, listen to your father and sister
coo over you, just think of
all the summertime adventures
ahead -
cousins to chase,
raspberries to pick,
trees to climb,
lakes to swim,
rocks to skip.
You bright summer star,
all the world beams
back at you.
~ Sarah Elizabeth Burns
Forster Family Portrait, 1919
Grandmother, you are two, barely,
the darling baby in a family of –
count them—eleven children,
plus who knows how many
additional miscarriages
or young deaths your clear-eyed
mother may have suffered quietly;
her German fortitude betraying
no struggles, she is all serene
and proud with her hearty brood.
Here, one of your sisters wears the
habit of Catholic nuns, in a few years
another sister would too.
In the back row: Hilda, Ella, Leo,
Sister Luke, Otto, Bruno, Laura
(later Sister Marcella) and Julia.
In the front row: Rudy, your father Frank
then you, little pixie, front and center,
your mother Mary, then Genevieve.
Grandmother, was it from your mother
or father’s line that you inherited
your wry sense of humor? Which sister
taught you to sew? Did your mother
make pickles with you each summer?
Which of these siblings was the prankster,
which the athlete, which the artist, which
one shy? What did your father like to do
in the evenings? Was your home filled
with music, baseball, stories round the fire?
Did your mother play cards like you?
How did you celebrate birthdays?
What did you do for the 4th of July?
I study the faces of your family--my family –
I hear the click of the camera,
the whoosh of the flash bulb.
A momentary pause
then in the next instant, I hear
you all jostling, laughing, heading off to lunch
into each individual and
infinitely detailed life.
~ Sarah Elizabeth Burns
You Can Always Change Your Mind
This meant as encouragement
from my father, to stride forward
confidently into the unknown
as we kids balked, indecisive
at certain key
or not-so-key points,
the luxurious heaviness of
choice.
And so I often did:
swapping universities,
frequently jumping cities,
moving breezily
from man to man,
sampling jobs,
begging friends to
lug my belongings to yet
another apartment.
I am grateful
for his permission to risk
and the practiced ease
to morph when necessary
or simply desired,
although I have often been
a rock skipping lightly on the
waters of the world
until
two small people materialized
and it comes as a relief, rather,
to be held fast to a choice.
This morning
my three-year-old son announces
I don’t want oatmeal
I changed my mind.
~ Sarah Elizabeth Burns
I Conjured You
I asked the doll maker
to give you blonde hair
and make you a girl
dressed in shades of blue,
my own best color.
Shall I stitch her name on?
she asked.
Oh yes, please
I did not hesitate
Georgie.
I was barely pregnant
yearning for a little girl
this time.
The doll arrived
in the mail
just perfect.
You arrived months later
exactly as requested
with only a slight
delay.
~ Sarah Elizabeth Burns
Arcadia
I had always imagined it as an elegant
country house in Cornwall or Galicia
with a library, extensive gardens and a
long dining table to seat many friends.
But now I think surely it is a small beach house
just like this with plastic buckets, shovels and balls
strewn about the yard, sea kayak and beach
cruisers leaning against the fence, colorful
bathing suits drying on the line. Our children’s
small tanned bodies sleep beneath
ceiling fans after a day in the bright air
running in and out of the ocean. Just down
the loop, waters a hue of turquoise I can never
fully believe lap sand the exact texture of
brown sugar. Two picturesque islands wait, close
enough to reach in a fifteen minute paddle.
Plumeria, jasmine and red hibiscus bloom
in the garden and we treasure the palm trees.
Neighbors drop by with avocados, strangers smile,
old friends visit. More than content, we live here
far from the noise of cities. You and I sit beneath
a canopy of stars sipping cold glasses of wine.
We breathe together, happy knowing all this
will be here tomorrow when we wake
and weeks before we have to leave.
~ Sarah Elizabeth Burns
Edge of the Known World
Where exactly do blue
whales swim? How is it
no one knows, she
wonders.
Also part mystery,
this boulder, velvet
with moss and lichens
lush.
Listen! The hushing rustle
of monarch butterflies
resting during migration
in a eucalyptus
grove. Are they sighing
lullabies?
She sits near nesting
Black-browed albatrosses,
feeling their energy,
attempting to listen.
What do they murmur
to their lifelong mates
as they dance, what goodbye
song before taking flight
over the open sea?
That familiar story,
oh so personal and yet full
of marvels. Birth,
growth, maturity,
courtship, mating, nesting,
raising young, dying,
death, rebirth,
over and over and
over.
What knowledge we
have, what mystery yet!
She herself vast,
a still mostly
unchartered
wilderness.
~ Sarah Elizabeth Burns
Taurus
From Peru, I brought him a small wooden bull
painted dark blue and gaily adorned with bright
flowers and golden horns.
He was a Taurus and I explained
this was a fertility symbol. I was
flirting, but quite serious.
I am not well-versed in astrology
but apparently a Taurus can be
independent, persistent,
devoted, thorough,
stubborn, uncompromising,
tactile, practical,
sensual and stable.
“If you like strong, loyal, dependable and generous men,
you’ll love a man born under the Taurus Star sign.”
And this:
“… a person of very few words” who
“can be slow on the uptake.”
The gift was a good choice.
Our son was born
under the sign of Taurus.
~ Sarah Elizabeth Burns