Cultural Prompt: “Learning to tame your grays between the dark and the fake…”

Doors

To my daughter, my pilgrimage partner

On pilgrimage to visit Jim, we found ourselves in a maze of doors. Did Jim pick this place on purpose? I don’t know. I suspect he was smiling

anticipating at every wrong turn the bouquet of astonishments we’d gather then preserve within the tomes of our souls. Who knew? Who knew today, too, we’d compare notes on craft with Proust, Moliere, and Wilde while Piaf sang to Chopin’s accompaniment?

They say Steve Jobs exclaimed wow, wow, wow as he, yet another rider on the storm, stepped through his own door

I don’t know about that either. But I do know

my daughter, my bequest to the world and inerrant map reader wore the flowers I thought I’d forgotten to bring.

©Jenine Bsharah Baines 2020

Sometime this past week, poet Amy Marley and I chatted about our mutual fascination with doors. She shared a haiku and I promised one in turn.

Meanwhile the team at Blue Insights suggested November’s Cultural Prompt…

I was particularly struck by this quotation in Francine Fallara’s article: “It’s an art to live with pain… mix the light into gray.” Eddie Vedder

And abracadabra, or perhaps I should say voila, since my pilgrimage to pay homage to The Doors’ Jim Morrison at Père Lachaise cemetery took place in Paris, I began this poem. Nowhere have I felt the presence of light in grey more than in that city of the dead with all its little doors.

I remember distinctly getting the sense that death is not extinguishment but a stepping through a door…into the extraordinary.

Which was when I noticed that my daughter — my “bequest” who’ll be here long after I, as will my infant grandson and his grandchildren — was wearing flowers. Flowers that would never die.

Light in grey.

And, yes, if you think she looks like Zooey Deschanel, you’re right. We were asked for autographs everywhere in Paris; even tabloids got confused…but that’s a story for another poem.

Thank you, Amy Marley, thank you, Francine Fallara and team at Blue Insights, thank you, readers…and thank you, Emily, for calling and saying, “Wanna go to France?”