Writing 125: Women and Memoir
Wellesley College
2.15.95

A Forgotten Poem
           - by Janet Si-Ming Lee

Somewhere outside, there is a world of laughing children. Somewhere outside, there is world of people talking too much or too loudly so they do not hear the loneliness of silence, the secret of life in quiet reflection. I did not believe in this world of lights and colors as I restlessly watched my aunt napping beside me during the afternoon in the back room of the apartment that faced away from Winchester Street. Sitting next to my aunt who lay fast asleep beside me, I studied the evening shadows flickering on the old walls, contemplating the darkness seeping in from the corners and gradually closing in to fill the room.

Evening shadows replaced the sinking dusk. My restless eyes gradually adjusted to the dimming room, noting the changes that shadows carved in familiar forms. There seemed to be an almost imperceptible silence embracing me. Focusing more carefully to this curious absence of human voices, cars passing by, and all the other sounds of a suburban town, I could hear an orchestra of crickets resuming there daily nocturne. Yet, I thought, if I strip the air of the cry of crickets and the gentle inhalations and exhalations of chests rising and subsiding, what is silence? Silence can only technically be described as an absence, a contrast to noise as life is a contrast to death. It seemed to me that night, though, that silence was a rushing sound like the wind if the windows had been open or perhaps, a humming of a darkness serenading softly to another seasonal gathering of inhabitants in the room. Somehow, I was touched by this silence. My life was not contained within these walls nor was silence a gift only to me. Perhaps, the people who resided in this room, like myself, had sat wide-eyed on long nights alone and contemplated life's transience. Today I am here, but tomorrow-- tomorrow someone else will lean against this same wall and dream the same thoughts.

Idily, I studied the posters around my aunts' bedroom. Large, scenic posters of a sun setting in Yosemite and Yellowstone, and another with ships' reflections on a red open sea that had a quote underneath: "We do not remember days, we remember moments" graced the room. However, one poster illuminated by moonlight captivated me in particular. I read the inscription below, "Love's meaning is life's secret" scrawled in delicate white print. What did it all mean? Love? Life? Are you alive because you love? Or are you alive despite the existence of love? Actually, I always thought the poster portrayed the profile of a beautiful, phantom-like woman with long, flowing, white hair. She appeared ethereal and fragile in her melancholy.

Looking out the window framed by withered branches scratching at the glass panes, I saw the ugly, dull, brick apartment buildings and the black garbage bags underneath the porch lying on its side with some of its contents strewn across the ground, remnants of some raccoon's feast. The bags wore badges of scratches where the raccoon's claws had dug in. Beyond my grandmother's garden of overgrown weeds, a street lamp across from our apartment casted a lonely halo on the pale burnt orange walls of the old nursing homes and I sighed. Somewhere, I could hear the faint strains of a single guitar weaving into the fibers of the growing darkness. I held out my hand to hold the music in my palm! Ah, but the music had drifted away, gone, lost to someone who was quick enough to capture it in her hand. Inspired by this moment, I hurried to write a brief poem in a childish effort to rhyme:

Time is like music passing by
We ride through memories on the songs of a guitar
As we ride, our memories are never too far
When our journey has ended, we don't have time to cry.

I remember this moment distinctly, and for years, I have wondered what happened to that poem I wrote so long ago at the tender age of eight, when I lay captive to the haunting, sweet voice of a lonely guitar. The summer before my first year of college, I stayed with my paternal grandfather as he struggled through his last days, dying from an incurable cancer. In my spare time, I had spent hours looking for something to entertain myself. One day, my grandmother took me downstairs to the locked-up room in the basement so I could take some of my aunts' books to read. Near the dusty books that used to belong to my aunts from their college days, I spotted a large sketchbook. Flipping through drawings my aunts did and then through pictures my sister and I sketched long ago, I found the poem that I wrote so many years ago. Suddenly, the words I wrote had meaning to me, comforting me as my beloved grandfather stood closer and closer to the rim of death each day. Many times, I feel that those words written when I was eight was left for me to find when I was eighteen that summer of '94. It was the gentle voice of my eight-year-old self explaining to my my eighteen-year old self what I have come to realize: I was no longer a child.