My Mother's Poem

Not long ago, we began going through old memorabilia, and I found an old journal of mine--one so old that it had a demin cover and gnomes sat ruminating on every page. A friend of mine gave it to me when I was 15, and I periodically wrote in it through my freshman year in college. It was as much a part of vague memory as any other thing neglected for 25 years. Then, suddenly it is in my hands, solid and available for review. Strange, how lately I keep coming across both items and people (a la Facebook) from days long gone. But one unexpected and soul-stirring renewal wasn't due to Facebook. It couldn't be because Facebook only brings the living back across our paths. This was a "visit" from someone who died 13 years ago. This renewed contact was through the journal, through a note stuck inadvertently inside its back cover. It was a poem written on a piece of clean, uncreased cardstock--stationary engraved simply with the name: Patricia Reeves. Patricia Reeves was...is...my mother. She wrote this poem and apparently gave it to me at a time of life when it was relatively meaningless to me, so much so that I didn't even commit its existence to memory. Now, as I look at it again with today's eyes, it becomes something invaluable.

Borne along in no-man's land,
She gave her name in answer to "I am"
Oblivious of her own needs,
She echoes others latent and dormant cries
For freedom from mediocrity...
Then echoes this claim for herself...
Thus she became enigmatic,
And beckoned others to follow her
To their goals...
But the victory was short lived.
For in their victory, it was she they embraced
And in winning...
She lost.
And she stood near those who would speak for her,
Laugh for her, sob for her...
Until each one...disappeared.

The words, scribed carefully and cleanly across the creamy page. I wish I had more to work with in understanding them. Was it me she was seeing, the me of today, of tomorrow? Like in so much prophetic poetry, who can tell whether the story has a happy ending? It is a subjective thing.

In Saving Private Ryan, Ryan was asked to live well, to do so as an act of service for the sacrificial deaths offered for his rescue. How strange, though, when the commission for a future well-lived, commissioned by those now beyond the grave, comes personally and not just through a fable, a war story. Help me, God, to become the best of what my mother saw in me...