Last Independence Day By Steve Heins, 1979

(For Gladys Lucille Harmon Heins (July 4, 1921 – March 6, 1976)

Last Independence Day

By Steve Heins, 1979

(For Gladys Lucille Harmon Heins (July 4, 1921 – March 6, 1976)

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,

Businessmen 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 mound.”

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.

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On July 4, 1921, Gladys Lucille Harmon (Heins) was born. She was a great mother, who would move mountains for her son when he was a boy in Gillett, WI. We lost her 43 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.