American Life in Poetry

Faith Shearin’s poetry is conversational while moving gracefully and almost effortlessly toward conclusions that really have some punch to them. This one is a good example of that. Shearin lives in Maryland.

Music at My Mother’s Funeral

During the weeks when we all believed my mother

was likely to die she began to plan

her funeral and she wanted us, her children,

to consider the music we would play there. We remembered

the soundtrack of my mother’s life: the years when she swept

the floors to the tunes of an eight track cassette called Feelings,

the Christmas when she bought a Bing Crosby album

about a Bright Hawaiian Christmas Day. She got Stravinsky’s

Rite of Spring stuck in the tape deck of her car and for months

each errand was accompanied by some kind

of dramatic movement. After my brother was born,

there was a period during which she wore a muumuu

and devoted herself to King Sunny Ade and his

African beats. She ironed and wept to Evita, painted

to Italian opera. Then, older and heavier, she refused

to fasten her seatbelt and there was the music

of an automated bell going off every few minutes,

which annoyed the rest of us but did not seem to matter

to my mother who ignored its relentless disapproval,

its insistence that someone was unsafe.