Blue

 I don't remember what I wore that day but 

I still see the way he plopped down on the bed

beside me just before he left to run an errand 

on his way to work- his weight, his hair and freckles,

how tall he'd grown in sixteen summers on the earth. 

He took the script I held and tested me to see if

I had learned my lines, such silly lines, a comedy

that opened within weeks. By then I'd come home, after the

applause and bows, the glass of champagne sipped, and sit 

inside the car all by myself to contemplate 

the ins and outs of joining him in heaven even though I knew 

it wasn't yet my time to go. It hurt ... so much ... that it was his.

Twenty years plus four have passed since then. Today the sky

is blue, the air both hot and heavy when it hits my thickened skin,

an accessory, don't you agree? that every grieving parent needs to own.

There was no script for this, no cues or blocking, and the others

in the cast were just as lost as I on where to stand or what to do. 

But. 

Even though the play has lasted twenty years plus four, today ... 

today the sky is blue.

(c) 2024, Ellen Gillette

Adam Gillette was in an accident during the early hours of August 20, 2000 and hospitalized for two days. Declared dead on August 22, Adam was an organ donor, saving the lives of five people and giving sight to two others.

Thoughts on a Plane

Sitting on this chilly plane I pray the babies will stop crying

and I wish I had the energy to make up stories for the strangers all around.

A June flight got changed to
include a SEVEN hour layover
in Las Vegas. Ugh.

They chuckle at the videos they’re watching on their phones

or talk or doze. The engine drones,

my eyelids shut but not before a sudden thought astounds.

Is someone watching me instead

and making up a story that explains why I have left the ground?

Would I be the star, the heroine, the damsel in distress?

Whatever their imaginations be, I’ll bet they’d never guess

that I am sitting here wrapped up inside

the clothing of the dead,

which sounds a bit dramatic but is true.

Leaving Vegas, I am wrapped in Mama’s sweater

warm inside the heaviness that hung on cancer-ravaged

bony arms there at the end.

We’d never seen her thin although she said she was, in school.

The sweater isn’t stylish,

not my color, doesn’t match with what I am wearing but I thrill

to think that Mama,

like she did when I was young and sitting on her lap, still

wraps her arms around me now and then.

When my husband’s sister died,

the clothes she’d bought to keep up with whatever size

she was that month hung, waiting, in the closet

until Mom said take whatever. I’ll just give away the rest.

Her jeans caress me now,

a pair I never saw her wear or don’t remember

but they’re soft and stretch enough to cover my vacation sins.

In life, though family, we were never best of friends

but in her jeans now

I am grateful for the grace that taught us to at least pretend.

Leaving Vegas and the desert far behind

no money lost, no money won,

and if again I travel there it will be much too soon

which sounds a bit dramatic but is true.

(c) Ellen Gillette, 2023

Note: Riding on the airplane I jotted down a few notes, that turned eventually into a poem for my writing group, then changed a little more as I read it to them.

Siblings Day

It's Siblings Day and Becky, older by three years,

George Swain Pendergraft
b. 2/10/1960
d. 2/25/1960

is seven hundred miles away, a little less perhaps. 

And George, the baby of we three, who would be sixty-one 

but never got to blow out candles on his birthday, 

not a single one, is even farther, walking streets of gold. 

We would have spoiled him, more than likely, 

but a baby brother might have tempered

my own tendencies to take out teeth from Becky's doll

or play the nurse, giving shots to Barbies with the ball-topped

pins from Mama's sewing box. If babies grow in  heaven,

if the elderly grow young, I picture him at twenty,

tall and strong, his red hair glowing in the city 

with no need of any sun, walking with our mother,

father, and the almost-twin who is my son.

(c)Ellen Gillette

July 1st

It feels like June was never here,

as if the record of my life was scratched;

the needle jumped and now it is July.

June bled out slowly, in reality. My mind

goes back and plays the record at

another speed to slow it down, revisit

every moment of the early part with projects

filling time and then the phone call on the 10th

that stopped the clock, the calendar,

the calm that settled in for days and weeks,

that lulled me into thinking I was fine.

Decisions, deadlines, Daddy's death

and boxes of the memories he left behind,

photographs of people with no names,

of buildings without people, trees, flowers

more than anything as if their momentary

blooms had been a lesson that we didn't

even recognize the need to learn.

Smiling children who grew up with him

would sit and weep on padded pews and later, 

shovel dirt inside the hole beside my son. 

But that was then and now it is July, too soon

and yet, in many ways, not soon enough.

(c) Ellen Gillette, 2019

On What Might Be

Adam Rogers Gillette --
 born May 22, 1984
died August 22, 2000 --
ever loved and missed.

I might be working on the menu,
calling him to ask what his request was
for a birthday feast, his 35th, a special celebration,
and all day I'd think of how it was
that afternoon I fell in love, the comments
I remember made by friends and family
who joined us for the moment
he would make his entrance.
"If the baby's just another girl," his brother
said, "I'll give her to the neighbor."
Their sisters played outside and
I could hear them through the open window
in our bedroom as the pains got harder,
faster, little time to rest between them, but I tried.
Thirty-five years later I'd be making sure
his brother wasn't working or that his sister out
in Texas could call on Face Time at a certain time to
join the "Happy Birthday" singing with the rest of us.
His other sister, I might ask to make the cake,
or help me get the house as sparkling clean as
you'd expect when welcoming someone you love.
At 35, perhaps he'd have a wife and children,
little freckled versions of that handsome face
and auburn hair. Perhaps he'd bring a story of his day
at work, or something new on the horizon, but
the conversation wouldn't really matter as we basked
together in the glow of laughter, of shared memories,
and knowing nothing of the heartache that we have instead.
This birthday and the eighteen other ones we've spent
without him have in common so much joy
there are no words to accurately describe it,
and as well, the sense of such deep loss that if it
was a painting, it would be in shades of grey and black
and if it was a poem, it might be something just like this.

Ghosts of Thanksgiving

They represent, collectively, 800 turkeys carved or more,

Norman Rockwell's famous
"Freedom from Want" painting

2000 pies, a treasure trove of casseroles, a semi load of

sweet ice tea, hot rolls with butter by the barrel. 

Sixty years, around, of holidays made special 

for their families and friends. Or not. Some have the look 

of scoundrels still. Old age does not erase past hurts,

but listening to now cracked and feeble voices try to

stay on key for Silent Night, I hope that there are people

who will visit those who gave them many memories 

in younger years, who set a table with the candles 

and good china, worked for hours on a meal because that's 

what you do. Or what you did once long ago.

(c) Ellen Gillette, 2018

Simple Question But

If you ask her how she's doing,

Ancient Greek vase

you can count on this: No,

really! Count it out, although

I wouldn't recommend you say

it where she'll hear you - that would

be a little crass. But silently, wait

one, two, three...

in seconds she'll stop telling you about

her life, her heart, and start to tell you how 

her husband is, the kids, and did I tell 

you what my grandson did last week

in school? At least for years it was that way

exclusively,  so wrapped up in

the lives of others that she almost

lost herself, but lately, she will catch herself,

and roll her eyes and grin, and maybe

make a face to show she knows what

she has done. 

"I'm great," she'll say, regardless

of the circumstances all around her,

and it's true. She is. She always was.

But now she knows it. 

And it took awhile

before she saw it, saw herself removed

from anyone or anything, just her,

just who she is. But she had help

(one almost always must have help).

"And how are you?"

(c) Ellen Gillette, 2014

Good Reason to Cry

Image found at:
http://hairasidentity.com/

She couldn't get the spelling done,
and there'll be hell to pay when she gets home.
She tried; the letters started dancing on the whiteboard
and distracted her, and then the time was gone.
She's crying, halfway out the door as if
just standing there will make the punishment in store
diminish into vapor, disappear as she has prayed
so often that he would. The bell will ring and she
will have to leave, the stupid teacher
thinking she's just misbehaving yet again,
the bullies teasing, hissing "baby" as they pass her
in their hurry to board buses that will take them to their
happy homes where daddies tuck their children in at night
and mommies still cook dinner. When the man gets home
and looks inside her bookbag, sees the note, he'll hurt
her like he always does when she is bad, and she'll be sore
down there again, and Momma will not care. She needs
the man too much, says he gives her things she has to have,
the medicine so she won't get the shakes that no one's
s'posed to know about at school. Whiner, she will say,
go to your room, is this the thanks I get for finding you
a better place to stay? She hopes that Momma doesn't know
what he will do when she has passed out later. Stupid letters
on the board. If they would just stay still, she'd write them
down on time. She wouldn't cry. No one would call her
baby, stupid teachers telling her to just calm down, already,
you're in second grade, you shouldn't get upset like this.


(c) Ellen Gillette, 2014


I subbed the other day and saw a little girl sobbing, right before dismissal. Another student volunteered that the girl hadn't gotten her work done. It seemed an overreaction, but we don't know what consequences she faced. I hope it wasn't what I wrote about here. But it happens.