Bekah is doing a

project on some family history for school. In looking through old papers I came across two items that I'd been looking for for a very long time. One I'll share today. A poem (loosely speaking) I wrote about my brother after his death 29 years ago:

In Memoriam J.F. W.

The long hours have fled us by—
you and I are sundered by the tideless sea.

And now, left behind, how can I express
the weight that presses hard upon me?
The weight wrought by your loss?

A beginning came on a day in March
as you and I walked the temples of the
Great City, the city immersed in cherry blossoms,
the city covered by a carven azure dome.

Yet for all the beauty of day and place,
the beauty that transfixed me was the
discovery of my brother.

The tenderness with which you touched
that day and gave it to me
belied all your gruff exterior.

You loved. You cared. And I, I had
been given a great gift:
A brother, a friend.

The years crept away and so did you.
Gently you fostered in me that which
taught me to hear you aright.
Gently, did I say? Through tear and
anger and argument momentous over matters
the most part trivial and less than noble,
You forged a person who could think.

And our years and days were parted again
until the death of one that we loved
beyond the telling of words.

Though the days were evil and fraught with sorrow,
yet we stayed together as a family. And you,
dear brother, were as a mighty
magnet to us all.

The warehouse days ensued.
Oh, what agony and sweat!
And how I thought you cruel again and
bitter hard. Yet for the joy of our conversation
one day I should endure it all again—all again.

It was but three when we began. We talked and
shared and risked the great risk.

We spoke of who we are and of what we feared.
We shared our dreams and heartaches and our tears.
We spoke of things that have been and things that yet may be.
We spoke as sunlight died and even grew. We spoke and spoke away.

Your face and voice tinged with laughter
and almost with tears,
remain indelibly etched upon my memory
down the corridor of the years.

And after that a change. For we had
probed our simultude and stood in curious awe
of the image mirrored each in each. So
different, so distant, yet so much the same.

We grew to an understanding, and almost I came
to worship you. You were to me an image
greater than life. So perhaps began
the downward trip to the tideless sea
that sunders even now
you and me.

To keep the image untarnished, immovable, strong,
you hid yourself from me

and for long I guessed, but did not know...

until you were not.

Alone now I stand upon the tideless shore and
in my mind and heart I probe,
trying to see through the thick sea mists,
but I am daunted.

O fallen idol! I loved you and I do and shall,
but for who you were, not for whom you dreampt of being.

William Weedon, May 1985