Listen, Soak Up and Enjoy...Behind the Poetry is a Living Whole Online podcast series that spotlights the stories of poets. The more we deepen our understanding and appreciation of the creative process from which music, art, writing, photography, filmmaking, energy practices and family connections emerge, the more we can embrace those creative energies within our own lives, and enhance our health, healing and relationships with ourselves and others.
Award-winning poet Linda Flaherty Haltmaier, in this conversation with Kathryn Hayward, MD, describes and reads her poem, A Visitation at Dinner, which is the first poem in her collection, Shadows Set to Burn. It is a courageous and powerful poem that Linda wrote about her mother. It won the Robert Frost Poetry Award which Linda says was “gratifying for me because it helped me be more sturdy and brave about releasing the collection.”
[When rereading a poem] sometimes I actually can discover something new about my own poems...I think curiosity is one of the keys to unlocking that door...we think we know people...moms are super complex people who had full lives before we came along and continued having full lives while we were there that we didn’t know about because we were busy living our lives...
-Linda Flaherty Haltmaier
A Visitation at Dinner
by Linda Flaherty Haltmaier
It has been a while
since the gash in the ground
swallowed my mother,
her brass and mahogany chariot
slipped beneath the feet of the living
and the crying,
each cradling a lily plucked in silence,
a starburst of remembrance
sanctified by the moment.
Life hurried on,
gained speed,
her funeral card dropped into
the drawer of confusing objects,
cousin to the junk drawer,
where locks of baby hair, defunct keychains,
and collars of pets long passed
are stashed and pushed about,
their value utterly worthless
yet incalculable––
the paradox of what is left behind.
But somehow my mother showed up
at dinner the other night
between sips of Cabernet
and knowing laughs with friends.
Slipped the bolt
from the other side
and waved me through
to a place where grace grows
like the pinkest phlox in May,
redolent and lush.
And as if sprinkled with
the forgetting waters of Lethe,
I felt my armored heart tilt
toward curiosity,
filled with a fondness
for the person she was
and tried to be,
wondering about the origin story
of the freckled redhead
who loved to play stickball
with the boys.
How this visitation occurred is unclear––
perhaps an undigested bit of beef
or a strange alchemy of time, distance,
and red wine––
but something softened that night,
rage gone slack,
a respite.
Stripped of my bespoke grievances,
I could see her beyond the threshold,
perhaps the way God sees us––
flawed and fallible,
worthy of love,
swinging full tilt
at both balls and strikes.