Christine Saari

A Soldier's Grave - Front View

A Soldier's Grave Inside mixed media

A Soldier’s Grave

L’viv Ukraine 2007

White acacia blossoms drift gently to the ground.

Hallowed ground for me.

Here, in Lemberg City, L’viv today,

is my father’s resting place.

Here, under my feet, lie his bones.

Here, in a park in the Ukraine, is his grave.

It is quiet here. The grass grows tall.

No marker bears my father’s name.

Yet, I know this is the place.

In my hand I hold a photograph

sent by a comrade long ago.

Lemberg. Styra Park. May 15th, 1944

on the back. The image shows

a hill of earth, a wooden cross,

flowers even, and nearby

a tree, a slender tree, strangely forked.

A young historian shows us the spot.

Soldiers’ graves erased from memory.

Elsewhere, graves were covered up by factories.

Yet, Styra Park remained, a massive monument

to the Russian Liberation of L’viv.

And, nearby, a tree, strangely forked,

strong and healthy after sixty years.

White acacia blossoms drift gently to the ground.

Hallowed ground for me.

I lay wild daises onto the grass.

The Baptismal Gown

A Cloud of White Lace

She did not leave it behind,

the baptismal gown

stitched for my mother

in 1906. A cloud of white lace.

It came along

when her dead husband’s children

kicked her out and she left

to keep house for her brother.

She carried it to the Austrian Alps,

for her granddaughter’s baptism,

to link the generations,

to soothe fears of impending war.

The gown sailed to America,

waiting for our sons’ christening.

In Boston, in an alien church

my grandmother’s gown felt like home.

Our grandson wore the lace gown

at St. Christopher’s in Marquette.

Four generations on two continents

have been baptized in it.

In Protestant churches, in Catholic chapels.

In Pomerania by the Baltic Sea.

In the Austrian mountains, on the Atlantic coast.

On the shores of Lake Superior.

Soon our grandson will marry.

His bride eyed the gown

hanging from a gallery beam

in Austria and smiled.

Christine Saari, writer and visual artist, grew up on an Austrian mountain farm and emigrated to the United States in 1964. She has written a memoir about her parents and her childhood: Love and War at Stag Farm: The Story of Hirschengut, an Austrian Mountain Farm 1938-1948 (2011). For the 20 years preceeding, she worked on an extensive series of mixed media art, Family Album that depicts the story of her 20th-century European family. Her poems have been published in Maiden Voyage, Water Music and Silver Birch Press. Her recent book of poems Blossoms in the Dark of Winter is available at the Gallery (130 W. Washington St, Marquette, MI).Christine will read from her poems on April 4, 2019 at the Gallery, 7-9 PM. The Austrian farm is still in the hands of her family and has become a refuge for her, her husband, their two sons and three grandchildren.