Farewell
My father passed away peacefully on Sunday morning. I missed seeing him by a few hours and have been in Portland with the family all week. I wrote a piece on my father a few months ago when he was having a high school auditorium dedicated to him. If you’d like to read it you can CLICK HERE. Tomorrow we commit his ashes to the earth and celebrate with family and friends his rich and dedicated life. It will be a good day with friends and loved ones and I’ve no doubt he’ll be there, baton in hand, directing the whole procedings as if it was one of his concerts or a march down Main Street. He was always the consumate showman and we’ll do our best to get it right, to do him proud.
Below is a well-known poem by Robert Hayden that says so much about understanding love and its many ways of being expressed. I’ve also included one I wrote this week in his honor.
Clyde Moore 1921-2007
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Robert Hayden
**********
We Remember Him
for what he loved: music
first and country, the beauty
of a woman, her brilliant smile,
a small dusty town, the kids
who picked up a flute, lifted
a trumpet to their lips, rolled
a pair of drum sticks between
their fingers for the first time.
Like a pearl the legacy of a man
is ground and polished by the grit
of tenacity, unwavering generosity.
We are what we do every day: rising
to dress, the long walk to work, stoking
the holy spark of others to flame.
I gave a damn, his life says. And like
the sassy-sweet croon of a sax hanging
on a high note, such a man echoes
forever in the hearts of the living.
