‘I hope you’re wearing a dress made of silk and stars’: Poems from Centre Crest nursing home
For me, December usually marks a special celebration: It’s the month when I work with my students at Centre Crest nursing home to edit, prepare and perform the poems we’ve been writing all fall. We invite friends and family to enjoy the fruits of our creative labor and share students’ work in freshly-printed booklet of poems.
This year, things are different. At the beginning of December, Centre Crest reported that nearly 90% of residents were actively infected with COVID-19. And while I’ve become accustomed to the ways our society dismisses older adults, I can’t say I was quite prepared for how starkly this pandemic would bring ageism to light. Many people seem to think that the death rate among older adults, especially those in nursing homes, is a fair price to pay for being able to travel and gather as they please.
But who gets to decide what a fair price is? And how much of our willingness to make that payment is predicated on our sense that older adults aren’t really people at all?
Sometimes it’s difficult to empathize with people we don’t know. So, I’d like to introduce you to some of the members of the Centre Crest Being Heard poetry writing group. In making “window visits” with residents throughout this autumn, I’ve written down memories about prairies and mountains, jotted down philosophies about aging, listened as folks talked about guardian angels and hit men, activism and mysticism, politics and God.
Below, I share with you excerpts from the resulting poems, all authored during this pandemic year.
Linda Kennedy
Early in the fall, inspired by local haiku poet Anne Burgevin, writing group member Linda Kennedy wrote haiku about her childhood in Idaho:
Whirlpools in the Snake River
The lanterns’ yellow light
Empty tall corral
Charles Myers
Meanwhile, Kennedy’s fellow writer Charles Myers wrote a number of poems about his years of work in local manufacturing, car sales, mining and more. But before all that, he worked on his grandfather’s farm in Julian. One of his poems describes an anecdote from those agricultural years:
Next thing, it happens.
The wagon wheel busts off the wagon.
It upsets the wagon and the hay goes
rolling down the hill. I go rolling
down the hill with it.
The bales of hay were rolling down the hill,
across the road, across the hay field,
into the little pasture field, then stopping.
Lu Henninger
Lu Henninger, who also grew up on a farm, met with me via video chat recently. We had just seen the first snow of the year, and she remembered winters past:
One year it snowed so deep,
it had a blue cast to it,
like the sky was down
in the crevices.
That was back in the years
when you had the deep snow,
we don’t have that anymore.
On top of the snow, bird prints
like little twigs going
in lines across the back yard.
Keith Dowdy
Keith Dowdy, a long-time writing group member who lost his mother last year, wrote a poem addressed to her:
Ma, […] I hope you’re happy where you’re at.
I hope you’re wearing a dress made of silk and stars.
[…] is it all that you thought it would be?
Are you still singing
Great is Thy Faithfulness, your most requested song?
Allan Bowers
Allan Bowers, a bohemian and musician who died earlier this year, also wrote an elegy. In a poem dedicated to a long-gone friend, he reflects on the landscape they shared:
Off in the distance there was this big green
mountain range
and I would imagine a big wall of water
splashing up
over the top of this mountain range. Like the water
was going to fill the valleys below.
And everyone
was going to sail off to new places, new peace.
It hasn’t come up
in my memory for many years.
Jim McKinley
Many of these poems reflect the rich community within the writing group and the nursing home at large. Jim McKinley, one of the longest-standing members of the writing group, wrote an elegy this autumn for Bowers’ partner, writing group member Laura Johnson:
To see you coming from a distance
a quickness to your step
and black skirts swinging,
a big smile on your face,
an excitement in your voice…
[…] I’m sure
you are doing lots of creative writing,
your heavenly poems must make
our earthly poems seem dull.
Eva Mighells
Along with imagination, memory figures prominently in many of these poems. In a poem called “Salamanca, Seneca Nation,” Eva Mighells remembers:
When we were there we had a garden,
we raised the white corn.
You pull back the husk,
you braid it, you make a big braid.
We lived in a house that had a real nice attic —
the people would come in and we’d braid the corn
and they’d get the young guys to carry it up
three flights of steps and leave it
in the attic over the winter.
All these braids
hanging down like wisteria.
You had to pound big spikes in the rafters
to hold the corn.
Reading through these poems, I’m reminded that death itself is not an injustice. But there is such a thing as an unjust death. Injustice happens when we don’t care enough about each other and our shared world. I hope these poems inspire as much care and curiosity in readers as their writers brought to their making.