Ora Pro Nobis

An old bit of poetry written ten years ago or so, shared on this Thursday evening. The girl is real. She died in a car accident before her eighteenth birthday fifty years ago, and I had not seen her for two years before that awful day. Yet her eyes have lived with me all these many years. I have seen only one other young woman with such eyes--a Baltimore girl of Irish descent with dark hair and pale flesh. Both possessed a gaze of dewy innocence, a prelapsarian tenderness and sense of wonder. 

                                                    Ora Pro Nobis
 
                        The dead die when we living let them die;
                        We breathing clasp to hearts our breathless dead;
                        We pack them lettuce fresh on icy beds.
                        In silent rooms they speak our names. They cry
                        To us: “Remember me! Remember me!”
                        Ah, Cissy, I remember you. Your eyes
                        Which last saw light at seventeen still lie
                        In me like jeweled cuts of sun-cut sea.
                        I dream your eyes, their baffled quiet grace;
                        Others forget, but I do not forget;
                        You prick my prayers, poor altars of regret;
                        My mind’s sharp eye calls back your sea-sun gaze.
                                    Pray all, I pray, who read these lines of song,
                                    For her whose eyes are gone when I am gone