Last Independence Day
On July 4, 1921, Gladys Lucille Harmon (Heins) was born in Lamar, CO in the bowls of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. She was a great mother, who would move mountains for her son when he was a boy in Gillett, WI.
We lost her 40 year ago this year. She had a sweetness and generosity about her, but she was also a firecracker befitting her birthday. Taken in 1947, this photo shows how happy she and I were to have Dad back from the Philippines after WW2.
For Gladys Lucille Harmon Heins (July 4, 1921 – March 6, 1976)
Last Independence Day
When talking about death
You said you wanted to be cremated.
Neither religion or dying would be
The escape your ashes offered.
Was a grave stone’s solace too permanent
A shout of your name?
The cemetery just too stationary
For a firecracker like you?
Or, was the seduction of the Rockies
And its towering vistas too great?
These thoughts stand before me
Like these airport buildings
Shimmering in a crazy dance of jet fumes.
I received the dreaded late night call
Sister sobbing the news
And now I travel to Oklahoma City
To join your cremators.
You were born on Independence Day,
July 4, 1921, with a great, great Cherokee grandmother
Said to be a part of your heritage.
Your parents were from Kansas, so flat fields
Here in southeastern Colorado must have given them comfort.
You told me that as a young girl
You thought the town of Lamar
(some five hundred frontier souls)
Celebrated your birthday: Climbing
High into the trees, you
Spent your tomboy days watching
The red, white and blue fireworks of July.
Outside the airplane window,
I see vague images of your life remembered,
Then I notice two jet vapor trails
Suspended next to each other
In the pale blue March sky.
Inside the plane, marble mouthed children
Practice for a life of words,
A woman bends to knit a red sweater,
Businesssmen whisper secrets back and forth.
“Mother, I repeat a promise I made to you:
You will join the clouds gathering in the foothills
Where you can see hundreds of miles
Of the Rocky Mountain peaks and prairies.
This will be your burial ground.”
Looking every bit a full blooded Cherokee,
I remember your face in the casket
As I toss your ashes into the mountain winds.
Now, you are beyond the scattering of your
Last Independence Day.
Steve Heins
--
True poem, Stephen, thanks for sharing your poetic care.
Lucky you as I was/am, to have an enlightened mother.
Get free, stay free.
In the end we all return to dust as humanity stumbles along with the dust of infinity at our heels as our shared humanity becomes a mist, tangibly visible or invisible to mankind whose only real journey is confronting their humanity.
My father survived the Turkish genocide of Armenians during WWI and as a 10 year old he buried his grandmother in a ditch as she told him to do and then escape in the night from their concentration camp which he did and roamed Turkey doing odd jobs and stealing food. He met another Armenian boy and they traveled together until the British Army briefly took over Turkey after WWI and brought in the Red Cross who facilitated his departure to relatives in America. After all he had been through he embraced humanity and always tried to connect with people which served him well as he became a successful businessman.