Remembrance of Mama-Gracie Lee

LOST TREASURE

At the corner of Bull and Broughton Street,

Mama waits, turns her head, reaches for my small hand, we hurry across that intersection head west towards Kresses.

Time tips over, spills like lost treasure, evaporates, ebbs away.

At the corner, I wait, watch the four o’clock rain scatter, splash off the brick facade of what remains of that memory.

Mama turns to me, tunnels through that darkness in my soul.

Summer day 1973 and 2017 collide with a crash at that Savannah intersection.

Me, as a young child pause, reach up to grab hold of the edge of Mama’s dress.

Me, as a middle-aged woman pause beneath the Starbucks awning and grapple with the pursuit of Mama’s ghost rounding corners, retreating from me with each footfall, with each year, with each turn of the earth, this parched landscape.

Bull and Broughton Streets intersect like roads wrapping up lost lives.

I cannot connect those disappearing dots, darkness drowning me-sunlight-Mama runs by.

I race behind her, I bury my face in the mounting moments-turn my chin upwards like a stone statue, stare beyond the passing away of that piercing pain.

Mama is gone, but her shadow falls across the sidewalk, turns to me. The rain fails to wash away her shadow trapped like a hand print upon the earth.

Copyright 2017, Jenny Andrews

SPIRIT CHASER

Those things we left behind that late summer evening.

Us-defeated, trudged, zigzagged, through brambles in that overgrown garden. Weeds and broken sticks-futile, slow. We pilfered our youth-casualties we became.

Shadows of our great-grandma’s spirit shifted through slats in the sod hovel.

“Spurious, unctuous” were words she had scribbled across great-grandpa’s photo-his broad face turned ever so slightly away from the camera’s focus.

No sunlight filtered through the open chimney space,

azure sky faded to deep gray.

Cycle of life, those things we left behind.

Great-grandma’s sod hovel in the middle of that overgrown cotton field.

Great-grandpa’s broad face

Unctuous

Spurious

moved slowly across the room.

Closing the door.

Patter of summer rain, cooled us.

Those things we left; those things we lost haunt us, seep into us, saturate our spirit, drown us with each drop of rain.

Copyright 2017, Jenny Andrews