Verna Quartette

by Nina Serrano

• "On Verna's Passing"

• "Feather"

• "Her Hair, Always Her Hair"

• "Day of the Dead"

Introduction to "Verna Quartette"

The first drafts of these poems were written in the year after the death of my friend, Verna. She was born, Verna Richey, but became Verna Pedrin by the time I met her, then Verna Brown in the last six romantic years of her life. These poems are the markers of my journey through grief. They follow the paths of old stories that tell of the Gods' visits to the underworld in search of their departed loved ones. In time, those deities emerged back to the world of the light and the living, showing us mortals the healing path.

I wrote the first poem at a poetry writing workshop, focusing on Chinese poetry, which I attended with a heavy heart. My relatively new friend, Diane Wang had organized the workshop at my house. It was the day of Verna's memorial. As I read poems written a thousand years ago, their ancient words of love and loss resonated in my heart. The poets' moans of grief lingered through the ages. My dear friend, Judith Knoop picked me up from the workshop and together we went to Verna's house as we had for years and years.

At the memorial ceremony, we scooped Verna's ashes from the urn with a shell and sprinkled them around the roots of an apple tree in her backyard. Soon after, Minnie Bateman, a friend, I was just getting to know, brought an egret feather to console me. She had found it on the ground on day of the memorial. Thus the second poem was written.

After Verna's death, I felt very cheated that she had died because i believed she wasn't finished with her life. There was so much she was still trying to do. As the months went by, I began to remember her at different stages of her life and appreciated how full her life had been. This is when I wrote, "Her Hair, Always her Hair".

That spring, I dug up a piece of the scruffy lawn in my front yard and created a small flowerbed, as Verna had suggested a few years earlier. After the garden passed through summer and fall plantings, "Day of the Dead" was written for the first anniversary of her death and her birthday. As I prepare this manuscript, five years after Verna's passing, I see the front yard is now almost all flowerbeds with no trace of a lawn.

On Verna's Passing | Feather | Her Hair, Always Her Hair | Day of the Dead 1996