Katie's bookmarks were waiting for me

Yesterday I found a book of poems that we kept on an end table at our old house, and I settled by the fireplace to read it: American's Favorite Poems edited by Robert Pinsky. I noticed a stiff card marking a spot near the back, and when I turned to it I was surprised to find a postcard addressed to Katie for an upcoming college visist on February 18, 2002. She would've been a junior in high school, and this would have been fairly soon after September 11, 2001. The poem it marks is by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Dirge Without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lillies and with Laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,--but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,--
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

more of Katie's bookmarks

Katie had a habbit of tearing the edges and corners off her school papers to make thin bookmarks that she tucked deeply into the binding of books. The next poem she marked was by Mary Oliver:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper I mean--
the one who has flug herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneal down into the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Two more poems are marked with her slender torn bookmarks, and maybe sometime I'll type them here as well. But the important thing was finding this small connection with Katie. She may have been choosing poems for an assignment for Mr. Craig, or she may have been marking poems she enjoyed. But it's these little connections with her that are so important now; they're all I have left.