Roma Lambert Mortensen is a retired nurse, teacher, and massage therapist. What refused to retire is her love of the written word. Starting in her late teens and ebbing and flowing between her childhood on the farm, her professions, and raising three children, her words streamed into poetry. Five years ago she joined the Otter Creek Poets and was encouraged to publish her first book: The Unclear Pool of Remember. Roma and her husband of over fifty years live in rural Vermont surrounded by fields and woods. For several years, they have been visiting elderly people in the community (currently via Zoom) to bring them music and song.

I was lucky to be given the gift of Roma’s book recently, and I was soon immersed in the fragments of her memories of growing up and growing old on a farm in Vermont. It’s a memoir in poems, and there is something dreamlike about the way details tumble forth, but our attentive Roma is present from childhood on, observing and documenting, viewing life with the wonder it is due. As the introduction states, “They [the poems] tell an incomplete story of people, places, and times that have fragmented into memories. But without these fragments, the people, places, and times would cease to exist at all.”

And that’s why I asked permission to share a couple of the poems here on the Living Stories Collective. It seemed so very consistent with what we strive to do: capturing stories before they vanish into forgetting, keeping alive the people we have known and loved, and seeking to retrieve wisdom from days gone by that might be useful now.

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 Transformations

My Scottish grandmother fashioned

Intricate and colorful hand-sewn quilts

In patterns like baskets and butterfly wings. The

Cloth scraps were gleaned from Mom’s sewing

Sprees of blouses and skirts to lure sister and me

Out of comfortable farm clothes.


On sunny-summer Monday mornings Mom

Arranged wet laundry on the lawn to bleach.

Limp, worn towels and sullen washcloths,

grayish barn-socks and kitchen dish-towels

spotted with blueberry, grape and tomato were

stretched out on the grass forming

a patchwork pattern bordered by green.

 

By afternoon I was sent to the backyard

To fetch the sun-dry items.

Surprised, I paused. On the grass

under the kitchen window was a flock

of cloth butterflies with wings, showing

faded food-pattern tidbits and bodies, formerly

gray, now sunbathed toward dazzle.

 

My young hands folded cloth butterflies

And took sweet-smelling summer into our home.

Inspired, I picked up notebook, pen, sat at

my German grandmother’s tiny desk searching

for verse to create poetic wings.

 

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Olfactory Ocean

Like Mom’s delicious beef-bone soup

gathered leftover vegetables,

Our family’s farm kitchen gathered odors.

Barn, cow, and faded manure scent wafted

from a waterfall of well-used jackets,

shirts, and hats which casually cascaded

from a line of steel coat hooks stretching from

behind the back door to the captain’s chair with

its worn-to-shiny seat and arms.

Floor cradled dry and drying footwear which

gathered around two coal-furnace vents,

who merrily broadcast like ocean spray

smells from all items within heat reach.

Harvest weeks added dusky-sweet perfume

from hay-chaff or fresh-cut corn stocks,

or later the worked tang of corn silage.

Clean-up days had the sharp alert of Pine-Sol

on wet linoleum or the bite of bleach

lingering around Mom’s gray wringer-washer.

 

Rolling in from the daily wave of meals

was the aroma of Mom’s creations:

fresh spareribs in her secret BBQ sauce, mouth-

watering clover-leaf cinnamon buns, or salt

pork caressed by spicy bubbling yellow-eye

beans baked on low all day, witness to many

covert taste tests.


Older, I ride with friends past a farm

And listen to derisive remarks about the smell

Coming from behind a spreader and tractor.

I smile. A beloved vision floats in:

Our farm, Mom’s fragrant kitchen, and

Our family gathered around the dinner table.

A slice of warm, savory homemade bread

is in my hand, and Mom with shining eyes

passes me her wild strawberry jam.

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Get It Done

Get the hay in before it rains.

Get barn chores done before breakfast.

Get the cows. Milking starts at 5 p.m. sharp.

Barefoot I gallop from the barn

on my pretend horse,

gitty up, gitty up,

down the farm-field road,

dip under the one rail gate,

and ride past the prickly bushes.

At the top of the hill I stop.

below me cow paths wind between rock,

stone, daisies, buttercups,

and occasional anthill.

Come booooss,

I walk halfway down the hill.

Come booooss. Come booooss.

Down by the swamp two, three

Black and white heads lift.

Come booooss.

The old Holstein with the broken horn

starts toward the hill. The rest

follow in ragged columns of cow.

They plod up the worn paths.

Behind, I urge them faster.

 

A frisky trouble-maker breaks rank.

I dash across the hill after her

and trip, fall, pain, tears.

My reddening toe bends in,

starts to swell. More tears.

 

Finally I’m up, limp after the cows.

They’re milling at the gate. I open it.

They file into the barnyard and then barn.

I stumble in, see Dad,

white grain-store hat brim

Work-brown and wet-rimmed.

Sweat drips from his chin onto his

bare chest, hair flecked with dirt, chaff.

He looks up, brow furrowed. You’re late.

 

Readers who would like to order a copy of The Unclear Pool of Remember can do so here

 

 




Posted
AuthorCyn Carbone