To dance beneath the diamond sky

by chuckofish

Our mother died twenty-four years ago today. She was 62 years old. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of her and that I don’t miss her.

She was, indeed, a pilgrim and a stranger in this world, but I like to think of her in heaven, dancing “beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands…” My mother was no fan of Bob Dylan. She feared the change he heralded, but she did like “Mr. Tambourine Man” a lot and that line in particular. I always thought it described her alter-ego perfectly.

Here is a poem that I found in one of her notebooks. It seems appropriate today.

Life

I made a posie, while the day ran by:
Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie
My life within this band.
But time did becken to the flowers, and they
By noon most cunningly did steal away
And wither’d in my hand.

My hand was next to them, and then my heart:
I took, without more thinking, in good part
Times gentle admonition:
Who did so sweetly deaths sad taste convey
Making my minde to smell my fatall day;
Yet sugring the suspicion.

Farewell deare flowers, sweetly your time ye spent,
Fit, while ye liv’d, for smell or ornament,
And after death for cures.
I follow straight without complaints or grief,
Since if my sent be good, I care not, if
It be as short as yours.

–George Herbert