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