poems from The Grace of Light by Kathe L. Palka

Photo by Frank Magalhaes Professor Karuth’s China When the armies marched away from Gettysburg they left behind a community in shambles and more than 51,000 killed, wounded, and missing soldiers. Wounded and dying were crowded into nearly every building. Most of the dead lay in hastily dug and inadequate graves; some had not been buried at all . . . —Gettysburg Official Map and Guide. Here at the Visitors Center, your china rests behind glass, ageless flowers whole just as they were before the battle began within your view. Returning home in the aftermath to Seminary Ridge from a friend’s safe haven in town, you traveled streets full of the moans of the wounded, the dying, and questioned your Lutheran God. Could peace come? The dead lay heavy on the fields. Yet your house still stood holding all it had before and more: bullets embedded in the walls, but even your Haviland china, though scattered throughout the rooms with the remnants of a soldiers’ meal —unbroken. A portent? What hope it must have given you, that men, in the midst of war, stopped to treasure beauty, savored life, tasted the delicate spice of civility; that even in the urgency of battle, remembered their humanity, and knew to lay it down with care.

Mother’s Teacup Eggshell fine, a treasure left to her by my Welsh grandmother. Back home from a visit, the week she starts chemo, I find it in a photo she just gave me, one culled from a box full of faded sepia, the edges crimped and curling up like smoke. Taken at my first birthday, the dining room a stage set with all the family impossibly whole, the cup rests in the background on a china closet shelf. Six years later it fell in shards at my feet, the day I had to touch it, feel the coolness of ageless flowers, the only time she ever raised her hand to me, to punish what we still can’t change.