Compiled by Katie Ludlow Rich
Exponent II 26.1 (2002), 5
“My Mother’s Ring” by Ann Gardner Stone
You wore it
Almost fifty years,
The only jewelry
On your pioneer-plain hands.
Its golden face had never
Shown its age.
No pocks to mar;
No ruts to trip a touch.
I marveled at such a shine.
Five months ago
They pulled it from your cold,
Unbending finger
And pressed it
In my death-cold fist.
Today I noticed scratches
On the ring.
What makes our lives
So different that
In five short months
My life would show itself
Upon a surface
Your fifty years left smooth?
Ann Gardner Stone was an associate editor of Exponent II, the retreat keynote in 2002, a stalwart organizer of the Midwest Pilgrims retreat, and a beloved poet. She passed away in 2006.
*
Exponent II, 16.1 (1991), 15
“War” by Emma Lou Thayne
January 20, 1991
6:45 AM
WAR
Where are we?
The world has gone out of my heart
and taken it along.
Death flies sorties like fireworks over Baghdad
And mothers mask their children in Jerusalem
for when it comes,
The underbelly of a new world order
Delivering no longer by hand.
At home we telephone each other
As each “too late” explodes
And what we pray for, like an ancient slogan,
Is undecipherable in the signals
of jammed radar
and targets on fire.
Mother, we always called you
Leaving or coming back
To say we were safe
and unconfounded.
And Father, you were always there somewhere
Counting chances for a not impossible future.
How is it possible not to feel responsible
For the woman and her generations in the Bedouin tent
Or the pilot from North Carolina gone up in flames
over the desert?
Not to curry the favor of sleep
when only the connectedness of prayers
can open the skies
to drown the sirens
and unclog the heart
and re-chart the world
screaming in the night?
Emma Lou Thayne was a writer, poet, Exponent II columnist (the “West” to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s “East”), and the retreat keynote speaker in 1993 and again in 2013 in absentia. She passed away in 2014.
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Exponent II, 17.1 (1992), 11.
“Orphan-Widow” by Helen Candland Stark
I
Sons and daughters circling her bed
She rallied briefly;
“Be good children.”
Then we were motherless.
Leaving the hospital
I picked up her work shoes from the repair shop,
As the eldest of nine, I thought,
“Now I must step into those shoes.”
I tried. I failed.
II
Near the back door
Available for the first planting day after winter,
His work shoes—
Heavy, mended, but clean and oiled against the need.
Yesterday I moved them out of sight.
In no way can I step into those shoes.
In no way dare I even think to try.
Today I weep in tenderness for shoes.
Helen Candland Stark was a writer, longtime contributor to Exponent II, and for many years funded the personal essay contest named in her honor. She passed away in 1994.
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Exponent II, Vol. 8 No. 1 (1981)
“Lullaby in the New Year” by Linda Sillitoe
One week is not too soon to learn a very
early language, for your spine to be aware
that a rocking chair means comfort and your wary
nerves want sleep.
Nothing will disappear,
Forsaking you in vast, fluorescent air
Your fists and feet can’t pummel. You shudder
At my kiss, a random bother in your hair.
I tell you this, my loud and little daughter:
you have now all there is—familiar dark,
a blanket’s wings around you, milk within—
balanced with your head in my hand’s cup
in a second cradle of flesh and sound.
We rock
And still you rage. I kiss your hair again.
All right, I whisper, accept, accept and sleep.
Linda was a journalist, historian, and poet who served as Exponent II’s poetry editor for several years. She passed away in 2010. Salt Lake City, Utah
*
Exponent II Vol. 5 No. 1 (1978)
“First Grief” by Margaret Rampton Munk
Last night, my daughter—
Mine by right of love and law,
But not by birth—
Cried for her “other mother.”
Accountable
And duly baptized she may be,
But eight is young,
So young,
For grown-up grief,
The first I cannot mend
With Band-aids,
Easy words,
Or Promises.
I cannot tell her yet
How I have also cried
Sometimes at night
To one whose memory
My birth erased;
Who let me go
To other parents
Who could train and shape the soul
She had prepared,
Then hid her face from me.
“Meg” was a political scientist, poet, and longtime contributor to Exponent II. She passed away in 1986. Silver Spring, Maryland
