Many years ago my friend and mentor Milania Austin Henley shared with me a poem written by her friend Claudette Drennan Kane upon the death of her son in 1993. Last year, in this season—liturgical, historical—I was drawn to it again. At that time I contacted Claudette’s husband Robert Hilary Kane, without a reply. I recently learned that three weeks later he had died. (My attempt to reach their surviving son has failed. I of course will remove this post upon request.)
Every mother’s faith is pummelled by the death of a child, and this moment in time, like too many others, causes us consciousness. As Claudette writes, we witnesses die too.
Beneath a Tree on God’s Friday
Say Mary’s Son was Schizophrenic Like Mine
They Also Die Who Only Stand and Watch
These claws are thoughts of him,
My grieving curling in my throat and in
My inner inmost skin raking and scraping.
Peace, I beg, falling on the earth,
I’m a skeletal leaf, writhing and twisting
Over the loss of all he’s worth,
Over the waste.
I press my face, for comfort, on the belly of the earth,
And find it a belly of stones. I grind my face to bones
Ripping away the vision of what he could have been.
Oh, for some thought, some thing of beauty,
To break my seeing, a symbol, anything to resemble
Some miracle of deeper meaning. And then I lift my eyes
Into the green beauty of a tree: into a feast, a godsend,
An inner room, a maze of figured light,
Where breathing is a shimmer of a figuring wind.
I am a leaf: part of what I lie beneath.
I transubstantiate to ecstasy.
I vault to heaven and seven times seven
Are the leagues I leap off the tips of my boots.
But this is not peace. No. Exquisite flight
This is, but not peace. For oh I know this godsend
Is no simple miracle that I can comprehend:
One seed became a tree, one
Where thousands died. Only one
Fulfilled by chance, grew beautiful. Just one,
Where billions tried. A billion, billion, billion
Failures. Some feeling their failure, like my son.
How can I bear it.
I scream, “I was promised every sparrow would be counted!”
Shouting, “A sparrow fell! See him! Count him!”
How can I bear it.
Should I behold the beauty of a tree?
See a godsend’s hidden history
In every wonder that touches me?
Simple miracles are what I want! Miracles I understand.
A tree that God can make with one word of command.
Not an enigmatic mirror where I darkly see
The swollen features of a horror: the tree of Calvary,
The mother standing by her son, watching him die.
How can I bear it. How can I bear it.
My heavy tongue, thick as molten lava,
Disgorges rage on all who cringe across my path, spits ash
On all who shrink from my choking smothering sorrow—
Mary, help me, make it right. Give some sign
Besides “I’ll work for food” to the wreck beside the road.
Passed by all the chanting winners,
Taking credit for their luck,
“It’s mine! It’s mine! I win because I work!”
Chinking their medals, ringing their precious gold,
Oblivious as they pass to the weird bird lying in the grass.
Mary, help me, make it right, work a miracle
For him. Or if there are no simple miracles,
Count him crowned who falls in thorns and thistles,
Count His groans as sweet as warblers’ whistles.
— Claudette Drennan Kane
Header image:
Passion reenactment
from Andrei Rublev,
Tarkovsky, 1966
Thank you for sharing this exquisite poem. The grief is harrowing, as only a mother’s would be. I wish we could have a collection of Claudette’s poems.
Thank you, Milania, for sharing it with me. In this season I’m re-reading Mary Oliver’s collection Thirst, which you gifted to Andrea and me on your visit here years ago. It’s a fitting companion to Claudette’s poem. I just read her “The Vast Ocean…,” which is sublime and its eucharistic theme timely. And last night I watched Andrew Henry’s discussion of the rite’s origins.