"A Hundred Autumns" by Galen Green, 1981

A HUNDRED AUTUMNS


Phoebe Evans McCall (1880-1981)

­­­

by Galen Green




On my grandmother’s 96th birthday I asked her what memories

Stood out most vividly in her mind, and she replied,

“There have been so many deaths”. So many tragedies.

And she began naming them to me one by one

From her own grandmother to her baby son

And the man with the mustache who had loved her all those years.

She’s with them now on the other side of the door.

Yet we who are still on this side, each of us hears

Her voice inside of us and can not ignore

The fact that we will someday join her on the other side

In that great beyond that God’s mercy will provide.



Those tough and tender hands that most of us can remember

Only as old and knotted from touching a hundred Novembers,

Those hands once washed a baby who became a great-grandfather

And a patriarch in his own right.

How often do any of us ever pause and bother

To consider that those hands – that were – when Sitting Bull was killed



At Wounded Knee – already ten years old

And strong enough and innocent but skilled

Enough to trip the wire to seed the stony earth

Into a world that passed this week with her

Into the forever past. It is like a blur

For me to look at her hundred autumns, her years

That witnessed a world turned upside down by depressions and wars

In 1914 when she was already thirty-four

And again in ’29 and ’41,

And even today the insanity goes on.



Where does a loved one find the words to say

That the last leaf to fall from the tree has blown away
And that that last leaf was a living history

Our last link with a world that’s blown

Into the dark of the past, the mystery

That we shall someday come to know again,

When the door has opened for each of us and then

We shall be again as we once were and she

To whom we pay tribute here today

Shall greet us each with open arms and say

That she had watched each of us make our way

Through our heartaches, losses and regrets

Until we, too, became the leaves that fell

Into the wind and towards our Father who forgets

Our wrongs and leads his children home.



10/28/81


%%%%%%%