Haibun: Marie’s Blue Eyes
I’ve looked everywhere for the poem I started about my great grandmother. This particular poem was about how alive her eyes were when the rest of her body sagged with the wrinkles a Norwegian woman would get at the age of 90. Who knows, that poem may be in some landfill with open batteries I should have recycled?
The poem, because I’ve recreated it a bunch of times, goes a thousand different ways. But I remember writing something about how the beauty of a woman is never lost, but centers in her eyes. I always remember her smile behind the big, round, and thick glasses. The blue in her eyes said that she was young and would live forever.
Another part of this lost poem said she didn’t have wrinkles, but instead, arrows. Her body put her beauty —the fire of her youth, her playfulness, and the loving wisdom of her years — in her eternal blue eyes. We made the mistake of calling them wrinkles and sagging skin. But the truth is, these lines were meant to come together to point to her eyes. All over her body, arrows pointing to her eyes. The first of these prophets were the crows feet earned decades before my time.
The eternal fire, the youth she still felt when her body gave into the tiredness of age, that fire burned ever brightly and still burns alive in my mind. I wrote it in the bliss of a memory in a place I’ve never found my way back to write it again.
