“Bertha lived: 1871-1924” --by Cat Russell
dark eyes pull me close
across the years between us,
downturned lips speak wordlessly:
you have a story to tell.
your pristine black-and-white
captures how pretty you were
with brown-bunned hair pulled up
above your shirt’s high collar,
within the pale oval of your face
your eyes light up this humble stone.
you were Mother, that is plain
as the word set above your own
somber photo--although
where did they go? where did
those tiny feet grow large enough
to find their final home? they left
the lamb behind to watch you
as you sleep beneath your blanket of dark earth.
they left behind enough for us to know
you must have been loved, must have been mourned.
your marker declares Christ your better half,
or were you his? you share your cenotaph
with him, sans setting face to name
its back’s memorial to his remains:
mere economy or more than that?
when your face feels warm sun,
it casts him into shadow.
at his feet, broken concrete hints
in words he does not speak.
you were Morningstar. he was Christ.
cold stone shows your photograph,
your married name alone,
the word mother, and dates
as though all your many days
amounted merely to the years you lived,
but you did live
and you survived.
you were born the same year Wilhelm was crowned,
died a few short years after women won the vote.
did you march for your suffrage? for your daughters’?
you traveled far from the only home
you’d ever known to a strange new land,
learned a foreign tongue,
left an empire behind to settle
your growing brood in nation not your own,
your sister’s place a refuge
in this brave new world.
did you wonder what it meant
when Einstein first bent space and time?
when Wright brothers unraveled sky?
you lived long enough
to see darkness dispelled,
banished from each cobblestone street,
nights electrified by Edison’s
new incandescence, long enough
to witness lines from pole to pole
connect voices ‘traveling round the world
near the speed of light.
neither your sons nor daughters
succumbed to World War
or Spanish flu or a hundred other
killers of children for they lived
long enough to outlive you:
three sons, four daughters,
a husband who must have watered
your grave through all his remaining days
for he made his final rest by your side.
you lived through it all--long enough
for women to have a voice in the country
you made home, long enough to make
deep impressions in this world,
to know the joys and despairs
of generations spanning one century’s end
and another’s birth.
you more than survived.
You lived.
*inspired by the gravestone of Bertha Loch at Massillon Cemetery (Massillon, Ohio).
Cat Russell 