She loved poetry and taught me to love it, too...

As I was 'plundering' through some papers today I came across words written in both shorthand and translated out that were words my mother had quoted while with me.

My Mother was in the hospital at that time with a broken collar bone. After spending several days in the regular hospital, she had been transferred down to the rehab center and my sister and I were keeping 24-hour tour of watch with her. A watch that continued on for quite a few weeks. This particular day was my watch. She was a spunky woman and didn't like being held down by bedrails, her kids or anything else and during the times I was on duty I would catch her in the middle of the day or night trying to climb over the rails, broken bones and all. It was so very hard to convince her she had to stay in bed and let those bone mend. Somehow, she decided she would exercise her hard-headedness when I was on duty. Maybe because I was the baby and she didn't want to take anything off me. I was still her baby. Apparently, according to my sister, she was an angel when she was with her.

This particular night she entertained herself and me by attempting to remember some of the poems from her childhood days or at least days before she left home. Her mother apparently also loved poetry and would quote poems to her children as they would lie on the floor and my grandmother worked on the old treadle sewing machine, especially on rainy days. Mom used to say she would lie there crying as her mother recited those sad, sad poems.

As she lay there, trying to be good and stay out of trouble that night, when I realized I had not remembered ever having heard that poem I grabbed a paper towel and pen and began scribbling in my "other language", shorthand trying to keep up with her as she went over each line, sometimes correcting herself, but most of the time getting it right. Later I would transcribe it and then I found it today.

It's amazing how close she got it to the words I managed to find on the internet when I decided to google the first line since I had no title. It's also frighteningly eerie how much information can be obtained over the internet by googling. Things that were a part of an entirely different generation that would never have comprehended a computer in their age.

I had marked down on the paper towel just above the translation, "5-1-97, 5:50 p.m."
Mom was born quite a few years earlier, so this says a lot for her memory clogged with pain killers or not.

This was her remembering the words or at least the best I translated:

Will there ever be a morning
Is there such a place(thing) as day.
Could I see it from the mountains
If I were as tall as they.

Has it feet like water lilies
Has it feathers like a bird
Was it brought from some foreign country
Of which I've never heard.

Oh some sailor, Oh some wise men from the skies,
please do tell this Little Pilgim
where the place where morning lies

Supposedly the real translation was as follows:

Will there really be a morning?
Is there such a thing as day?
Could I see it from the mountains
If I were as tall as they?

Has it feet like water-lillies?
Has it feathers like a bird?
Is it brought from famous countries
Of which I have never heard?

Oh, some scholar! Oh some sailor!
Oh, some wise men from the skies!
Please to tell a little pilgrim
Where the place called morning lies!

This poem was called Will there ever be a morning and was credited to Emily Dickinson. It shouldn't have surprised me because she dearly loved poems from Emily Dickinson as well as others during that era.

I can still see her when she made a mistake in her quote and realized it. She would squench her eyes and shake that little head and wiggle those fists to show she knew she hadn't gotten it right, then she would correct it the best she could.

I also had written down that she had quoted The old trundle bed.I knew I already had the words to that in a book entitled Best Loved Poems of the American People. I had bought that large book at Sears Roebuck when their main location was on Ponce de Leon, not too many years after marriage. It was a frivilous buy because we certainly didn't have a lot of money to be spending on books like that, but I found it and realized it contained so very many poems my Mother had recited to me over and over as she and I spent boring days in the cotton fields. It turned out to be one of my best, most favorite purchases because I still love to pull that book out and look up many, many beautiful poems. And, yes, they make me cry!

I don't think the other siblings really remember her reciting those poems. They apparently never learned to love her expressions as much as I did. She could leave me in tears as she would quote Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight, and I didn't even know what it meant. I just knew it was so very, very sad. Over the Hill to the Poor House was another very sad one.

I wish my granddaughter could have enjoyed hearing her great-grandmother as she shared her poems. I wish I could hear her once again!