A Memorial to Young Womanhood: text

As I walk along Blackstone Boulevard, “The birds are singing”, lured into a false sense of spring by these uncharacteristically warm days of February. “Through the calm pure waters” of the crystalline blue sky the sun glints down, illuminating a lone statue. Runners, walkers, and cars pass it by as they cross Clarendon Street, “Returning home from the day’s expedition”. Seldom do they turn to look at what could, in its youth and innocence, be the face of The Christ Child. Few know how she wielded her sword, her words, as I wield My Sword in The Tournament of the world, forever fighting the duel against time. Her story, the story of every little girl: How the Princess Came to be a young woman.

Nestled between a small pine, The Christmas Tree, and other saplings that in half a year will burst into the Fall Colors radiating the captured glow of a Summer Sunset, the statue guards its story and welcomes our own. She asks only for the Wishes and Fairy Revels that compose our lives. For children’s fantasies and dreams long forgotten have led us here where we forget what we would remember. So while I still remember, here: In Memory of a Chinese Doll that now lies tattered on the bed at my grandparents’ house, a ribbon around her dirtied porcelain neck to keep her head on. If only she were the most beautiful thing in the world to me As Once It Was. For now, “The impatient steeds are snorting.” No time for childish games or A Long Dream on An Autumn Night. The Wings of the Fall precipitating our flight to this finite earth. Anybody’s Way crosses the path of Constance Witherby. The Bud on the Tree will bloom and fall. Sunshine and Stardust twinkle briefly, then dull. A Winter Day inevitably follows the spring.

“Welcome” greets the statue, “to childhood, to womanhood.” In that moment when her life ceased, she simultaneously wore and shed the vestiges of youth. And for a shard of time, she was both a child facing the transience of life and a woman recalling The Afterglow of her childhood, the nostalgia of the life that was. Or perhaps she merely was an eye looking from a dark color, superimposing a nonexistent light, the Sunlight on the Pansy Bed that also lights A Primrose, also sings the Carmagnole of Spring, also fades easily to dusk. Coins could not fund the construction of The Abbey of Winds, the retrieval of The Lost Atlantis, the discovery of The Treasure of the Mountains. But words, poetry, rhyme? Or marble, granite, stone? How else then, when “The childish toys lie broken”? The roughened hands of youth become the alligator skin of The Charwoman. And always the Afterglow: the call of the ocean from A Seashell picked from the sand as the tide washes away its imprint forever. “The shore lay wild” even after your feverish footsteps, castle-building, sand-writing. The tide laps it all away. “Oh, to feel the winds rush by” as I did then, as the statue always does. To sing The North Star Song as I did when I knew where I was going, guided by the constellation of youth. Now I sing a Harvest Melody, liltingly proclaiming the changing seasons under a sky ruled by The Moon of the Falling Leaf. “Craggy mountains towering up” before me. And behind me “The mountains tall and silent”. Only in my mind, a Quondam land without horizon.

Occasionally, Music’s Memories call to mind some lilting melody. When I sing today, my voice breaks. “An elf danced” in the fortresses of my imagination where I kept myself “Deep hid from the soiling hands of the world”. Whither? The dancing elf. Whither? The self. The Minister of Finance is now more pertinent to a life of numbered lists, sequences, categories, facts. “When I was young” I believed it when they said All Roads Lead to Rome. Doubting not this final destination, I followed The Spirit of the Wind. But now, no matter How You Measure It, I am not content “In the heart of the city”. I’d rather encounter Snakes in India than the giant unknown of the dwarf star Ceres.

Diana and Minerva called Vae Victis to their conquered sisters. “Behind the clear-cut crags” “The great wind came from the broad dry plains” “The trees were black, one jagged line” and I called “Sunshine and moonlight sing a song to me” with notes as “Silver spurs on a rough log wall” and harmony in “All the planets slowly swirling”. For “Spring is a leaf, a song, a dance” and “From time to time, a far-off, doubtful glimpse” towards the barren bough, the silence, and the motionless. “Over the wall the heliotrope hung” as I cling to the car window while Going West to follow the setting sun. “It is not loneliness to know” that songs and “Poems are not made by happy folk”.

To D. G. S. H. To ____. Arithmetic in the simplification of name to acronym. Of family to initials. Ultimately, it is all the same. I will receive A Valentine—to D. H. W. H. from Constance. Longfellow in Physics Class might write a note To D. W. G. My poem could end with the title To Thomas Hardy. Yours To Rudyard Kipling. And the stray jogger following ever on the path After Carl Sandburg in that frantic Spring Fever of restlessness. “The sea is lavender, turquoise, and blue” and the roses are red and the violets inscribed To C. H. S.

“I long to lie on a sun-warmed dock” and contemplate my childhood questions: “Wind, wind, what are you singing?” that makes The Leprechaun dance and the Robin red. “‘You won’t go out there, boy, it’s death’” To me: Go out there, girl, it’s life. My memories are “Mountains of tawny sand” easily blown this way and that. “My head is filled with whimsies” and the Caprice of vicissitude. I will never be able to say Farewell—to E. R. S. or to Marie Josephine or to the “Dusk on the city street” that “Once in the long, long ago” could hide a Butterfly. So fly west To Wyoming in my Wanderlust in the Midsummer Madness that follows the Mirth of May and July. And on the way, sing the Song of the Dead when On First Seeing France my Fantasy—Notre Dame—towered unfathomably stories above. Cold stone irresponsive to my childhood dreams. Still, I Pity the Blind that cannot appreciate the Irony—Both of Intent and of Fate—that comes with the destruction of the dream. And finally “I came to the country of sunlight and gold” and “I noticed with peculiar care” the Discovery of self in the memory of you.

We died and die at Saas Fee.

Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology