Jo Going
Tundra and Song
—For Gustavo Motta
I live now
by that lake in the far north
where I came after your dying,
to cry, to write, to pray.
As the sky gathers leaves and swans,
it is your laughter I hear,
and your song.
What remains these long years after
is what i held in my arms
with your last soft breath:
the distilled
essence
of pure
love.
The poet writes: This is for my beloved brother and best friend, Gustavo Motta, musician, composer, stage director, who died during the early years before there was the medical help there is today. Keep singing.
Jo Going is the author of Wild Cranes (National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1997), a book of poems and paintings that won the Library Fellows Award. The book is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it is part of the Franklin Furnace permanent collection. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Bloomsbury Review, New Art Criterion, SECAC Review, Driftwood, Washington Square Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Nimrod. A resident of Alaska, she has held artist-in-residence and visiting artist positions abroad in Italy, including at the American Academy in Rome.
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Here is today’s prompt
(optional as always)
Today’s poem uses direct address (“you” pronouns and verbs) to speak to and about a loved one who died of AIDS before there were effective treatments (which became available in 1996). Write a poem in which you use direct address to speak to and about a person who died of AIDS—long ago or recently; loved one or beloved public figure; real or imaginary.