June 2020

The month of blushing brides and mortar-board tossing grads is upon us - except it isn’t. That is, the old symbols that for so long have been shorthand for June don’t work this year in which so much has changed and remains in flux. The long, solstice-leaning days flow into each other in a blur whether we are over-worked, out-of-work, or working from home. Meanwhile, processing loss has become our full-time occupation as we await the arrival of an elusive “new normal.” In this month’s featured poem, Catherine M. Weber eloquently expresses this very human struggle to reconcile all that has been lost with all that still remains.

Reconciliation of Loss

~~ After the sculpture Reconciliation by Kevin Duffy

By Catherine M. Weber

How do you reconcile the smooth and rough, cracked and intact?

At once beautiful and broken, wonderful and tragic,

inextricably linked, uncomfortable, but the way of things, nonetheless.

Like love and sadness, tied together forever in my heart.

As my golden retriever stands with her prize,

two baby cotton tailed bunnies, hanging from her jaw,

wagging with pride. I wonder at the nature of life and death,

and their utter connection. The horror and commonness of our existence.

As my love dies but is always present,

or perhaps never dies but is simply out of reach.

As the hard stone looks soft, the rope looks real,

bound up as if to hold together

something that was never broken at all.

As my son looks to the future, while struggling with the present,

never to forget his father

but not thinking about where he might have gone.

Choosing to make a lemon tart on Father’s Day in homage.

And I sit with the notion that I will never know why

Death visits at inconvenient times

and know that it just does, that this just is.

The stone is an optical illusion,

a perception designed by a skilled carver.

Energy shapeshifting, but the same energy, nonetheless.

~~ Originally published in Old Frog Pond Farm and Studio’s chapbook of ekphrastic poetry, Speaking of Sculpture, edited by Susan Edwards Richmond.

Catherine M. Weber is an award-winning poet and artist, community organizer, and digital marketing consultant with a passion for the arts, education, and the environment. Among her many roles she teaches art, marketing, and technology skills regionally, shows her work nationally, and organizes community programs and events locally. She is a charter member of New England Wax, a professional group of artists who paint with wax, and a member of the Southborough Cultural Council. She was raised in upstate New York, Indiana, and Connecticut and now lives in Southborough, Massachusetts, where she is the founder and program director for Art on the Trails at Beals Preserve. She holds a BA in Communications from Emerson College and an MA in Critical and Creative Thinking from the University of Massachusetts, Boston.