Words
from Jonathan Holstein,
Grandfather
The death of a young person has always evoked our most poignant human sympathies and sorrows. We think of what might have been, of who they might have become. Every culture and every time has dealt in some way with those painful realities of a short life. Greeks, intensely aware of the transience of our earthly time, celebrated life that had been, and spoke of their grief, with poems of mourning, elegies, a tradition carried into English through the great diffusion of the classical spirit. And when I thought of Luca, with whom I strongly identified because of the way, as soon as he could focus, he looked continually at everything, aware of the strange wonders of the world as he awoke to them, and slept with one eye open so as not to miss a moment or a thing, I thought of that heroic spirit that commands us to bring songs to our sorrows, and peace to our broken hearts. This is A Song for Luca, who was, though uncompleted, most complete.
A Song for Luca
As soon as they are born
We see
the people they will be.
I joked about the twins
who seemed, at my age,
ageless, and so I said,
that Luca is like me,
so smart and handsome,
but, of course,
both he and Asher
were and are like me,
like all of us, who share
by blood or inclination,
a common sense of place
of purpose, prose or pose,
of feeling, sense or vision
and here I mean
the things we choose to see
and how we see and feel them,
and how once seen or felt and known
they course forever through our lives
a piece of this or that
a part of something fresh or old,
they set the edges next to things
or join, complete or close.
This Luca does for me, and so shall do
as all the new things seen and heard and felt
become a part of all that there has been,
of all the things that tumble,
tiptoe, stroll or march
through aging brain and heart,
endure and love, remember, speak
in gratitude, perhaps the most
for beauty, brightness most intense
that lingered just a while.
(Words spoken at Luca Holstein Albers’ memorial service, 21 March 2008.)
