I have no dates on Evelyn's poems, but this would seem to have been written after Rose's and her mother's deaths. Faith and grief intertwined, inseparable, glowing.
Calvary Pilgrimage
I went there
(they said you were there).
One darkling day
I saw you descend
(each of you),
closed in a shining thing,
closed to me
forever.
I heard the music sigh
and the surrender sound.
I heard words
saint-sweet with your names.
Christ-sweet with His.
But it was no more true
of you
than of Him.
They could not close you
in a box:
not you,
white and shining --
more shining than sun
to remember,
whiter than starlight.
Not when there would be
tomorrow.
Not when he died
on a cross
who did not die.
I brought flowers......
purple and gold.
I spread them
on the sun-struck grass,
on the waiting grass,
green dipped of earth and sun.
Kneeling,
I made a purple cross,
and hung it with a gold heart.
I fashioned a cross
quickly --
more quickly than His Cross
was fashioned,
but sprung from the same earth
that bore the heavenly-burdened tree.
Oh, not sweeter than that Cross,
this new,
lying on the soft grass
under the wheeling sun.
Not sweeter.....
but sweet,
holding you and Him
together.
Evelyn Coffey
Wasn't Evelyn gifted with a natural sense of metaphor, of bridging earth and heaven, time and eternity? Grass, "green-dipped of earth and sun" - what a way to say that it grown in soil, grows because of the sun. The passive tense makes its verdure a gift, and not he result of effort or earning.
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