Poems in Honor of Our Friend, Marci

I’ve gotten out of the habit of writing these posts in the midst of a slew of administrative tasks at church. Planning and spreadsheets have their place in the health of a congregation, but the most beautiful expression of church I've seen this August took place around a hospice bed. Our friend, Marci Frederick, passed away this Sunday morning, after a too short and too long battle with brain cancer (after a long and difficult journey battling lymphoma).

In her final days, folks from her beloved church communities, including Immanuel, sat with her, trimmed her nails, read her psalms, sang from the hymnbook, washed her sheets, talked with her husband and daughter, swabbed her mouth, brought her flowers, massaged her fretful hands. I had the chance to sit with her twice. It was ugly. It was beautiful.

I didn’t know Marci well, though her wit, sharp mind, gargantuan knowledge of books and music, perceptive reflections, and richly crafted sermons drew me to her. I wish I could have known her better. Our community is much poorer for her loss.

Once on the way back from one of her oncology appointments, Marci gave me the highest compliment I could have received from her given her legacy of work at EMU. We talked about the blog being a chance to curate resources. She said I thought like a librarian.

One of the things we shared in common was a love of poetry. We emailed them back and forth and discussed poets we liked. The second to last time I saw her, I had the privilege of reading poems while she drifted in and out of clarity, and she stared at the golden chandelier above her bed murmuring, “It’s so reflective. It’s so reflective.” She had a keen eye for beauty even at the end.

For our brilliant friend, Marci, in the spirit of curation and a love of poetry, here are some poems of farewell for she who served the church with her heart, soul and above all, her mind.

In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

The Swan by Rainer Maria Rilke

This laboring of ours with all that remains undone,
as if still bound to it,
is like the lumbering gait of the swan.

And then our dying—releasing ourselves
from the very ground on which we stood—
is like the way he hesitantly lowers himself

into the water. It gently receives him,
and, gladly yielding, flows back beneath him,
as wave follows wave,
while he, now wholly serene and sure,
with regal composure,
allows himself to glide.

Compost Happens by Laura Grace Weldon

(one of the poems I read with Marci at her bedside)

Nature teaches nothing is lost.
It’s transmuted.

Spread between rows of beans,
last year’s rusty leaves tamp down weeds.
Coffee grounds and banana peels
foster rose blooms. Bread crumbs
scattered for birds become song.
Leftovers offered to chickens come back
as eggs, yolks sunrise orange.
Broccoli stems and bruised apples
fed to cows return as milk steaming in the pail,
as patties steaming in the pasture.

Surely our shame and sorrow
also return,
composted by years
into something generative as wisdom.

Rabbit by Heather Swan

(one of the poems I read with Marci at her bedside)

After a long numbness, I wake
and suddenly am noticing everything,
all of it piercing me with its beautiful,
radical trust: the carpenter bee tonguing
the needle of echinacea believing
in their sweetness, the exuberance
of an orange daylily unfolding itself
at the edge of the street, and the way
the moss knows the stone, and the stone
accepts its trespass, and the way the dog
on his leash turns to see if I’m holding on,
certain I know where to go. And the way
the baby rabbit—whose trembling ears
are the most delicate cups—trusts me,
because I pried the same dog’s jaw
off his hips, and then allows me to feed him
clover when his back legs no longer work,
forcing me to think about forgiveness
and those I need to forgive, and to hope
I am forgiven, and that just maybe
I can forgive myself. This unstoppable,
excruciating tenderness everywhere inviting
us, always inviting. And then later, the firefly
illuminating the lantern of its body,
like us, each time we laugh.

A Cure Against Poisonous Thought by Annie Lighthart

(one of the poems I read with Marci at her bedside)

Believe the world goes on
and this bee bending
in honeysuckle just one
of a mighty nation, golden
beads thrumming
a long invisible thread.

In the green drift of an afternoon,
the body is not root but wick:
the press of light surrounds it.