Poems For Maria Ellen Rice

These are a set of poems in memory of my cousin Maria Ellen Rice who died in January 2011 before the spring.

I know that she held a deep love of flowers, and these were ones we talked about in a long call I am thankful we had. I cannot think what else to say or do, but I do know that my skills are not up to what she deserves. I'll add as I can.



Violets

Stems snap at root
Beneath heart shaped leaves
Mountain floor jewels.



Azaleas


Mine were folded tissue presents
Unwrapped in springs long past
Gifted by a father and a queenly being
Origami folds
As simple as what
Sprang on a cold morning
Carmen, tangerine, magenta
Onto snowy branches
Opening a promise in spring fecundity


I teach an Azalea now
Not to dance and flower
Or to wave on the breezes
Removed from mountain and frosts
She is a blossom of possibility unfolding
I tell you this
As you lie wounded
Spilling your crimson heart
How can it be that
Our flowers could not just continue to
Sustain you?





Begonias


On grandma's porch in tiny plastic pots
There was always an overture of welcome
On heavy laden stems
(that I always thought would snap, did snap)
Begonias just dragged the edges
Enormous, folded, dancing mirandas
Set against log cabin up to the sky
Peering in to witness us
As grandma was watering and tending





Maria


I know your mother kept day lilies
for you. She told me so
Planted bulbs around your home
for you. She told me so
Sent me photographs once of them
all for you. She told me so


The lilies that I drew came from down our road
Growing wild in welcoming summer heat rushes
In the hills I knew as my mountains.
My mother scorned lilies
too rough, wild, too freely given.
To her a marigold, zinnia, the lily
Were "common."
So when I drew them she
Never failed to tell me that
Along with a secondary compliment
On the technical craft.


I think in some way you are aware of that,
Maria, in some way
You took in the lily
The wild look of wind
And reed, raw perfume spread
Into a fiery July night
Her tattered spent blooms
Set on these wandering stems welcoming
Another to try again.

I think you took in
Rock and stone, on sandy soil
That she could navigate. Her weedy
Humble attempt to beautify
The vacant lot.
You saw beauty there
Your momma told me so.




Wild Roses


We talked of them, do you remember?
Those you stretch a hand out
Only to have a finger full of her thorns
A splash of petals, a fence in
A pasture calling out Wild Rose.
While a gray horse stands
Watching our childish actions
We climb and grasp a handful of
Blossoms upsetting a bumbly bee
In the sticky, fetid, wet morning
Down by the creek bed still
Sticky with juice from a volunteer
Strawberry.

She's wild, this rose you say
Through the walk we took
In time and space there on the phone
But these are the ones worth knowing.
The wild roses in our hearts
That once grew around the fence
Posts in a pasture
Overgrown with thorny vines.



Lilacs


Avon made soaps
That also held the scent
We'd get them
From a neighbor
For our order.

Lilacs fell from
An old bush
In our yard
Planted years before
My house was parted off
And built.


Spring meant
Many things arrived
Congratulations on
Surviving the winter
Sorry for our losses
None more pleasant
Than pushing a
Nose into the lilacs.








Lily of The Valley

In the moss
Under the plum
Past the apple
By the black raspberry stand
Before the dahlias
Came the
Lily of the Valley.


Pretty girls,
Bell-headed
Strung on their stems
Ringing away in the breezes
Calling me to
Morning
Vespers.


Sweet little lilies
I might crouch
To say
Tell me of your
Days and they
Reply with nods,
"It's Spring."





Apple Blossoms


Once the breezes blew
All at once
Petals left their tiny fruit
Falling gracefully onto the
Greenest grass
A shower of pink and white.

That's how I think of
You now.

A moment in time,
Stage in life
Of the fruit of knowledge,
Delicate, ethereal,
Tissue, falling
Gently to the good earth,
In quiet repose.







Daffodils


when my parents divorced
My father wanted to take away
The daffodil bulbs he brought
From his mother's, that had
Belonged to her mother
Because he did not remember
That I was also connected
To them, but he waited
Until he had the victory of mom
Losing our home
And then dug them to place
At his new home
With another, then another.

They weren't yellow
They weren't single
They weren't even my favorite
Daffodils. What they were
Was my history.






Larkspur

A tender star
Held on a stem
Tiny estrella
Milky way zen.




Columbine


In the mountain
Pastures among
The burr and sticky
Sap that chaffs
My leg
Is a Columbine
Searching out
her spaces
Shedding as she can
Her tiny seed
Alive for a moment
In golden, with a reddish
Interior,
She resists
Transplanting
To the side
Of a wall
In a suburban split level
Ever after choking
Hers is the life
Of a mountain survivor now
Always free.






Dogwood

Let me crawl up my cross
swallow whole the news
The passing of your soul.

She is a stained cross
This bloom the reverend
Is preaching

Symbol of eternal life
Strong in spring snows
Her horseshoe petals splayed

In a crowded center
In four part harmony
She sits on her branches

This tree of life
Natural bonsai
The dogwood of the mountain

Conferring spring upon our
Cruel, claiming winter
An etude against our darkness.






Peonies


If a writer could be a flower
Then I think Eudora would be
A peony.

Hung heavy on the morning
Still, thickly perfumed
Made from layer upon layer
Of petals folded
Like an elaborate cuff
On an ancient grandmother's portrait
Or a ruffle on my hat
Silken taffeta in a
Room frozen by time.
The peony.





Queen Anne's Lace

As doilies go, this floral one
Reigns above the rest
We bow to her
Her intricately woven face
Held to mid-day heat
Sweltering with grace
The curtsy we offer
Of buttercup and court
In deference.
She's often entertaining
Lady bug or sparrow,
Duke of this or that
A cup of dandelion tea perhaps,
Some shortbread or sweet anise,
Upon a mustard leaf?






A Bouquet Too Lovely For This World


One day I looked up and in the field
Where my own violets grew anonymously, where lilies roamed
and I rumored snakes to keep things for myself
The neighbor stood with tractors
And a huge violently churning truck filled with cement
My father came to talk to me, through my pleading
He said, "Nedrow hasn't got the aesthetic
Of understanding what he does today, why your field
Matters dear heart."
Dad knew though, he had planted that in me, seeds I've watered
All my life.
Just as within you our family placed something too delicate to explain to a harsh
Industry.
Leaving a field wild matters, I said defiantly.
Dad told me then that it would be like talking to a rock
But he dutifully went out and failed
To make the blind see.

Somehow Maria you must be that field.
Oh cousin of mine
Home to these hidden flowers, insights, things too precious to save now
Lost to those of us casting a gaze
Out our life windows these mornings after
As the ground is torn apart, the cement cast churning
The beauty of the gentle flower
Plowed away.

Here in my heart, Maria, I carry you in a bouquet
One too beautiful to last
That I'm holding in my inadequate hands
With my poetic craft a miserable
Vessel to contain the sweetness of your good life.
I could not stand against that tractor
And failed to hold this back as well,
But your life was of greatest meaning to me.






The Trillium


When we talked
I asked you
If you saw trillium and may apples

You said
That you
Loved them and we rapidly spoke

Of this
And that
The rich deep reds the ones for me

You stopped
I listened
And in that silence stood all we couldn't say.






Spring


It must be true that
Spring's greatest gift
Is her floral
Reminder of the eternal
Triumph of life
Over our death
Hope for tired hearts






If I were

If I were a flower
I might be a

Crocus popping
Through the frozen ground
Unfolding my head
To caress the warmth.

Or , perhaps, a tulip
Pushing through the snow pack
Showing a cup of red
Opening to the sun


Or perhaps I'd grace
The forsythia's stalk as a pageant
In golden yellow coming out
To dawn's early light


If I were a flower
dancing in the precarious arrival of spring
Wondrous at the day
Perhaps a brief moment I'd light your eyes.

Sunday my cousin, in her thirties, very young, died.
The reasons I don't know, except to say I'd give anything if this wasn't so.
It is a tragic loss for our family. For the world.
A close friend remarked to me that life is so difficult, she often is surprised more folks can make it.
But we all don't..Life is short.
I heard this as I taught today finding her obituary:

Maria Ellen Rice - ERWIN

“Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts.” Psalm 139:23

To all who knew her, Maria was a special gift from God. Her capacity for loving others and creative ability are not to be forgotten by those who love her.



ERWIN — Maria Ellen Rice, 34, beloved daughter of Eugene and Pauline McIntosh Rice, of Erwin, died in Knoxville, Tennessee, on January 16, 2011.

She was preceded in death by her grandparents of Flag Pond, Tennessee: Richard and Axie Fender McIntosh and Parley and Edith Pate Rice.

Maria is survived by three devoted brothers and their wives: Michael and Gail Rice, Erwin, Marvin and Belinda Rice, St. Louis, Missouri, and Alan Rice, Layton, Utah. Maria had two nieces and a nephew whom she adored: Hannah and Chloe Rice and David Alan Rice.

Surviving Maria are several aunts and uncles: Martha and Warren Ricker, Garland and Eunice McIntosh, Kenneth McIntosh, Howard and Vonda Lee McIntosh, Foy and Nancy McIntosh, Andy and Debbie McIntosh, Robert and Martha Rice, Mary Sue and Phillip Mashburn, Brenda and Jerry Bennett, and Ivan Rice. She had many wonderful cousins and a host of friends: teachers, relatives, neighbors, classmates, co-workers, and people she served in her employment.

Maria was a graduate of Unicoi County High School, East Tennessee State University and received her doctorate in pharmacy from the University of Tennessee at Memphis. She was employed as a pharmacist at Mercy Hospital in Knoxville (formerly known as St. Mary’s.) She was a member of Phi Delta Chi and Thi Lamba Sigma.

Maria’s shortened life was full of movement. At Unicoi County High School, she participated in many activities that included band, track and long distance running. Listening, we can still hear her lively piano melodies and see her works of art. She left us a collection of poetry and short stories. To her, our mountains summoned and she simply liked to walk in their beauty. Always a lover of flowers, she rejoiced in planting them and enjoyed their glorious array.



“As I pass under the pure diamond raindrops of winter’s last tree, I see a reflection of what I was meant to be. To become a part of something great yet still maintain my identity. Flowing through the undercurrents and floating — One base note slides, slides down to one raindrop of resonance and harmony.” Poem written by Maria Ellen Rice.



Funeral service will be held at 8:00 P.M. Thursday, January 20, 2011, from the Robert Ledford Funeral Home Chapel with Bishop John Edwards and Daniel McIntosh officiating.

Committal service will be held at 1:00 P.M. Friday at Evergreen Cemetery. Those planning to attend the committal service are requested to meet at the funeral home by 12:15 P.M. Friday to go in procession to the cemetery. Active pallbearers will be Daniel McIntosh, Bruce Mashburn, Kevin Mashburn, Drew McIntosh, Aaron McIntosh, Patrick McIntosh, Chris McIntosh and Robbie McIntosh. Honorary pallbearers will be Hannah Rice, Chloe Rice and David Alan Rice.

The family will receive friends from 6:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. Thursday preceding the services at the funeral home.

Online condolences may be sent to the family at rfledford@earthlink.net.

Robert Ledford Funeral Home, 720 Ohio Avenue, Erwin, is in charge of the arrangements. 423-743-1380 or 423-928-4595

I spoke to Maria and had such a long, long talk about a year ago as she offered her care over my back surgery.
She was creative, sensitive, loved her flowers, loved her nieces, and nephew and cared for me too.

To say I'm overwhelmed is to understate it by miles.
I wish that

I am digging the fog, hey, let's teach music in school, get some standards around that!

When I taught in South Central LA 25 or more years ago I did not have this book.
What I had were two eyes, no funds, no books, no materials at all except binder paper and a box or two of pencils, a few readers, a couple broken dictionaries, and an extraordinary sense of the real difficulties instructing in the midst of the crack wars. I taught in grade school, Herndon the author, tackled teaching Junior High in the early 60's, releasing this book a number of years later as a reflection on the experience. The book was the way he came to terms with something I think maybe was an unwinnable experience. With so much current talk about "bad teachers" and getting rid of teachers- I think of the book.

On the cover this is how the book was sold recommended by the New York Times:

"Here is the sad, yet funy, record of one ill-fated year in a metropolitan ghetto school, 98 per cent Negro, 99 per cent "deprived", and 100 per cent chaotic. It tells how the educational bureaucracy, the schools, and life itself in our big cities are all rigged against the students who can't take it-the ones we call "deprived."

Since our national educational leader won't allow teachers any excuses, and doesn't think his policies do anything but solve the cycles of poverty, I read this book again with the same eyes I took to the issues I witnessed throughout my career working in poverty schools. I just hear too much truth to ignore it.

When we moved to the Salinas Valley, after this first experience (my husband taught with me) and I found the book the first month or so on a shelf in the library it called me back into contemplating what I had just finished trying to do. Survive. I believe it was found on a shelf marked "free books for teachers." I took it home and slowly working backwards I unraveled my experience in trying to teach in South Central Los Angeles in 1985-1986 at 93rd Street School. Somehow. The book probably meant more to me then than I can translate here.
It told the story of a man that entered a teaching job in a 99% black school in a ghetto, how he met each day, and how he eventually lost his job, but not his will to teach. The book was poetry, it was alive, it was one of the very few books that seemed to get the sound of it all right. And it's a study in what isn't said as much as what is. James Herndon, if you don't know, was able to translate to his times the urgent need for "school reform." He thought critically. And the way he did it was by staying close to reality. A willingness to look at it, write it, think deeply about it, present it and allow the reader to take away from his words their opinion.

Amazingly as my daughter's boyfriend is in his 4th month teaching in a high school in South Central-some 50 years later-and as far as I can tell not much has changed. As I hear of it through him, nothing much basically different except perhaps the severe escalation of violence I knew there- appears to be "better." If one would call it that.
I sent him the book.
I think he would agree that not much has changed.I felt he might be facing a no win situation.

Perhaps you've never read the book. I would task you to do so. Perhaps listening as if you were in his shoes would be a valuable retrospective on schools in cities like LA. Because gosh knows everyone thinks this work is easy enough to go do, it might be of value to start putting some perspective around that.
In the book Herndon describes the various periods of his day teaching English, pretty much focusing in not on the couple of classes that go okay, but on those kids "tracked" in this school who are basically very difficult to teach, difficult to reach, the failing tracks. As we base more and more on test scores -the result you must realize is grouping, labels, and divisions within teaching that always seem to lead to those who can in one place, and everyone else. In these brief chapters he will acquaint you with some of the absurdities that now in current reform mode continue to make much of what is said relevant discussion. I don't see much innovation. We narrowed, we track, we test in ways completely along the lines of what he saw "tried" in these schools. Management is escalated to a position of being mistaken for curriculum. What a great book for a discussion.

The poor "know" here, they know their "position", they struggle with schools designed to control over teach, they understand a liberating curriculum will not be their fare. And the teacher sits in the pages telling you how the year went, and the way he was dumped out of the classroom and why. When I read the work years ago it soothed my need to understand all I'd been through. If you think you might understand-you don't unless you've walked that line. Really, you don't.
What I loved was how he talked about the "system", how he took a sheet of paper and made it so very important. From a sheet of binder paper Herndon makes you understand the way it is.
In schools in CA scarcity is always an issue. It is enforced as a way of mind. Tragic underfunding is partially why this got into place-and that comes from a model that accepts less for those with less. Herndon takes the binder paper and uses it-and how it was distributed- to talk in his book to the system generally. It is hard to recreate his prose. Basically the admin won't let him give out much of this supply. The students want it, want several sheets at a time, this to his observing mentors is intolerable. Work isn't really done on it he reasons but the feel of several sheets really is a luxury they value, and the paper fixation stops any real accounting for the other things that don't exist-the books-the supplies-the work-the opportunity-the jobs-the pathways to higher education-the support system that isn't there for them. It seems that keeping the game of "you can't have it" going is important to the entire dynamics. It stands metaphorically both in the book and in his year. And Herndon coming in from outside this system can't understand it. He can just report on what he sees. And suggest to the reader through a piece of paper what long term antics have been used even societally over addressing poverty, racism and a multitude of issues in a divided class society. It gets better to read it now against the backdrop of these 50 years knowing what I do about teaching in high poverty schools, knowing about societal will.Knowing the shallow lip service in the last few years when over paying for new, dynamic, functional, modern, technological schools with well paid teachers and support structures in our hoods we've bought some crappy tests and supported a boat load of consultants that by and large "don't work with children." I've watched the paper distribution as well. We don't have it. Message clear. My school asked the kids to send in the supplies this year, not because we aren't getting two sizable grants to under-performing schools but to reinforce to parents a fundamental message. Pull up your boot straps you must "deserve" this somehow. It is no different than what Herndon documented really.

Somewhere along the line he gets advice from a teacher-a coaching one-about how to do his job as an English teacher, "Find out what they can do and give them lots of it," and I can fully attest to the predominance of that as the philosophy in the schools I've worked in. Herndon chooses to let the students make noise. He allows them to direct a lot of the choices. He figures out what they will write and lets them have at it in plays especially. I'm sure today, and certainly in the early 60's this was seen as so much loss of control. When he describes it I flashed to my paper bag project a few years back with an active far, far, below grade level group of 38 6th graders when they studied the myth systems of the Greeks and Romans, the Egyptians and Chinese in my room by creating elaborate paper bag puppets that were filmed and interviewed by a precocious student with a Larry King puppet doing an excellent impersonation. I sincerely doubt before the project there was ANY hope to get them read the myths. Most were 2nd grade readers any practice reading was pulling teeth. No they weren't reading no baby books. But to then see them script write and study Larry King's style, develop the filming skills, and do this as we were conducting other work, there was a decided three ring circus aspect. Noise and a kind of choas. The messy sound of learning. I'm sure it would offend someone looking for a chanting ritual as I so often see praised in my underperforming school.

I'm sure it would not appeal to standards thumping authoritarians. But, it worked. It resembled what the peers do in other places far away and ones I knew a bit about. On every level possible kids did better, including the scores. That was fairly irrelevant in his day too. Herndon lost the job just as he was doing the work to figure out how to do the job.
Here was a man clearly a brilliant writer, brilliant in his time, making learning in a constructivist way that was deselected.
There are places where he states something so important it still needs to be heard-how data ruled the day, how crappy the work of the kids was, how teachers were mostly there in an authoritarian stance -the students "making it" so beyond their scope, how student empowerment frightened the school leadership, how inexperienced the leadership was and caught up in "looking effective", how students reacted-spoke-interacted with him, how divided a society we were, how poverty looked at this time, what the students "saw" in the school as models, and how they saw themselves, how he worked building relationships, how quickly others advice fell apart, what excited students, how what he documents is really a social piece on being young in our country, as well as poor, black and alive with dreams and hopes in his times. It is the stuff of my work. And there is no one with the writing ability Herndon has writing now. Simply no one.


Who should read this? Teachers, student teachers, ed reformers, people that think they have "a lot" to say about education, those that are so isolated they have never been in an inner city school. Those who think they know about it anyway. Who is the audience? I believe Herndon left that up to the fates.

I have to fill you in on a conclusion he reached. Not that it will surprise anyone. But speaking to the students, their resilience, the effect of what he saw on their lives, he said he figured that many of the kids "could not take it."

"All right. Some can take it, and some can't. Those who cannot expose the point-it's not good for anyone. My wife's father was once bitten by a cottonmouth, and survived. Another man from the same community was bitten and died. No one argued that the experience was good for either one of them. Sitting in a classroom or a home pretending to "study" a badly written text full of false information, adding up twenty sums when they're all the same and one would do, being bottled up for seven hours a day in a place where you decide nothing, having your success or failure depend, a hundred times a day, on the plan, invention, whim of someone else, being put in a position where most of your real desires are not only ignored but actively penalized, undertaking nothing for its own sake but only for that illusory carrot of the future-maybe you can do it, and maybe you can't, but either way, it's probably done you some harm."

I don't know if that can be appreciated for what it is, in its simplicity. It calls on us to wage wars on poverty, to design good public systems, to not align ourselves with the interests of wealth, it asks of us to see what we do as not pitting a dog against a dog having our young essentially eaten. What Herndon was saying is that we are losing to this. And I can tell you my feeling is in the last ten years we moved farther and farther away from the truth of that as teachers in poverty public schools were vilified and blamed and we sorted those with better schools and opportunity into even better systems. By continuing our fascination with standardized test scores as barriers we choose to not deal with our children in need, we are rewarding those who started out ahead.
It might serve everyone well to go see how like 1961 we are.
It made me shake my head to see that stating something obvious just as verboten now as it was then. Something as simple as "it isn't a good idea to narrow the arts and music, science, active learning out of instruction for students in poverty."

Later in his life, on retirement, Herndon wrote another book I enjoyed-Notes From A School Teacher. Just as brilliant. One observation from that that stays with me- that school is exactly what society "wants" -no more and no less. I give him so much credit for making that completely clear.
And salute the career he gave to public instruction.

I'm trying to time this to the minute.

Have a Happy New Year!

Even though it says 11:55 Dick Clark was proclaiming Happy New Year when I hit the publish button.
Of course I could just set the time and fake it, but nooo.
My New Year's story is funny.
I went to school today to feed the fish, change the filters and pick up the staple gun.
We got there and thank goodness my daughter Sylvia went along.
I left my room keys on the lanyard I wear on the table, so it wouldn't get wet as I poured water in the tank-then without remembering I went out my door. I've never done this before. STUCK in the quad, no way to get back in my room, no way to unlock the chains on doors or front glass doors. No one there. No way to jump the ten foot high fences.
So...I of course panicked.
I picked really awful things to think about happening to us, and it was cold.
I really don't know why it got to me.
Really panicked.

Sylvia however kept her head.

Now I've faced broken arms at school, throwing up, lots of things that you might be surprised to hear. Things I did pretty well handling. Compound fractures...did okay, police actions, FBI tape and the bomb squads and helicopters overhead....
But this, no, it was cold, darkness was an hour away.
I think it was because we were alone.
So Sylvia thank goodness had her phone.
Yes.
While I sat there really useless she just called her Dad.

Somehow he called Mr. Ron who had once worked for him when he was in the District, then Reggie our head of maintenance. And my friend Heidi.
In minutes he said Reggie was coming to let me in.
In ten minutes he did.
White knight stuff.

And it took three hours for me get down from what the adrenaline did, man.

It's pretty great I work in a place that will rescue you. That is still about community. That has heart like it does have. I am starting the year with this thought. Thinking this is going to set the tone for the year, not the panic but the support system.
I didn't have to break a glass out or think of how to jump a ten foot fence or whatever. I was stumped but I know I'll never go in there again without wearing my key, holding my phone and being sure others are there too.

What a way to end a decade and start another.


I am however taking this as a little omen. Or a note to self, the fear was real for me today. I did something, made a mistake, and it took a bit to fix it and get safe. It just took problem solving. But that we knew who to call, got help, that others came to help without question, instantly, talked to me of the kind of people I work with, the kind of heart they have. It reminded me when my daughter stood by me of times I solved things for her, because she once went to this school too-it's a part of her- or spoke to me of when she was with me over the years doing my job. My life as a teacher. It kind of amazed me when I went to leave that Reggie got the gate, locked the fencing thing up for me. It reminded me of community really, what schools symbolize.
What I do.
Maybe it's a subtle shift, or a small thing, but I surely felt a rescue when I needed one.
And help when I needed it.