O, These Family Poems!

I have one more here by Madge Hall, that is, Myrtice Talmage Hall, the girl who married Harold Thomas; she married "beneath" her (according to Great-Grandmama Mabry, anyway, because Harold was only an airplane mechanic and went to the war and his people were not as educated as she was) (Lord knows she probably didn't want Madge to ever marry anyway, as the doctor had said having babies wouldn't help her health, and it didn't; she had my mama and died only a year and a half later, at age-twenty-six. She was pretty in a refined, patrician sort of way; I have a portrait and a photograph of her, that the portrait was made from).

I found it in Madge's cookbook that the bugs had gotten into and I had to clean off...we don't use poison in the house on account of, well, it's poison. And yes, that's the Royal We.

Get your own Royal We. If ya wanta.

It's not finished, probably, and I'm just guessing on that, but here goes. This will make you sad. It is written in pencil in cursive on its own page, right after a page with a list:

cantaloupe

spaghetti

lettuce & tomato salad

pudding or pie

dried peas (crossed out with pencil)

slaw (also crossed out)

peas & carrots

pear salad

(Now here's the poem.)

I love you--yes

But there is a strange

loneliness I feel

Even when you're near

I know it now

That saying--Love is blind

It's true!

I love you now--but not

The dear envisaged

you of long ago.

That other you I know

was not you

That dear you, loving things

I loved

Laughing together, flying

above all the world

(Bless her. So sad. We wake up sometimes, out of our strange fantasies and obsessions about other people. Where on earth do we get those ridiculous things?)