Unlit, A Corrie Poem

As a child, 

       I wondered about the  

houses without 

       wreaths, trees and lights,

and the reasons why …

                               a family left the house unlit. 

In a time 

       before I understood that

people celebrated

       different holidays based on

their beliefs, or they …

                                 did not celebrate anything at all,

I thought  

       of the different 

reasons why

       because beneath the knowledge

that cultures, and those with or

                                             without …

                                                    religion, across the world

celebrate at other times of the year …

                              exists another reason few discuss

in the same way

        some houses remain 

unlit at Christmas. 

      I cannot stand the car

commercials where the customer 

       actor says, “I bought it for myself”

                                           with a smile like the girls I knew in high school. 

but I still have a son who 

         begs his father to bring the

decorations out of the 

         attic, and says, “I’ll put the

candy canes on the tree” as he

         plays the music boxes of trees with trains

                                            that travel through a tunnel of the stump.

when I stop in the pharmacy to 

          pick up the picture holiday cards I’d

ordered online including a photo of

         our girl, almost seven months with wings,

with her big brother and Santa Snoopy 

                                              taken 

                                             last December 31st when a new year came …

with 

        a

            promise …

                                             broken. 

The cashier wonders about the 

        family with a portrait instead of their 

daughter on the front porch, 

        and when I recall a day in May worse 

than the coldest December day …

                                             on an ambulance in the rain …

A mother, age eighty six, standing next to

          me tells me about her Tiffany, and how 

she’d found her baby girl, age forty nine, 

          on the floor. “I only had fifteen minutes before …” 

                                        Yes, ma’am …

                                              I know the words …

                                                           “Before she was gone.” 

There in the pharmacy, she cries, and for the

              first time in weeks, tears spring from 

my eyes when she says, “I brought her into this world,

              and I couldn’t save my little girl.”

                                      Yes, ma’am … 

                                           I know, no matter what they say, 

                                               the feeling of failure when your baby girl flies away.

The woman tells me how she’d achieved her 

            life dreams of marrying her husband, having her

beautiful baby girl with curly red hair, “and you

            couldn’t tell where it begins or where it ends.”

for a moment, she smiles, and says, 

                                     “and I got John Wayne’s autograph.”

I give her my number if 

          she ever needs anything, and I understand why 

                                   there are houses without wreaths, trees, or lights.

Poem by Rebecca T. Dickinson

For Corrie,

For Tiffany