It was Snowing on the Monuments

It was snowing on the monuments
My dead father’s name next to my living mothers

You went further back into the cemetery
There where so many lies remain lost to winter

There with the named and the nameless
It was snowing on the monuments

All horizons packed with cloud cover
bodies
Some of us left in the vehicles
We came in

Some became some final gesture
Of departure’s sun borne reflected
behind auto glass
heat blowing feeling back into a face

It was snowing on the monuments
Even in the warmth of an engine turning over
You must forget how we came to this place
How we leave

A procession of memory
an immersion in going away
music

Voices of older songs already
In the broken gone
As some wheel turns us back
Onto a gray road

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“‘It was Snowing on the Monuments’ speaks to an imaginative return through memory, sound, and image. The first line of the poem initiates the visual imagery and works as a repeated line in the poem, as it calls forth the imagery that makes up the reimagined memory in the rest of the poem. In other ways, the poem speaks to an interior landscape, of a particular place I’ve returned to time and again: in memory, in person, in spirit, to visit, to pay respects, and to connect with a history and heritage of family, across seven or more generations. The cemetery is in Pine Point, near the church, in a small community on the White Earth Reservation. At the intersection of two roads is the place remembered, though the poem extends memory as it sifts through the place remembered, reimagined. I’ve returned to that place over the past five years or so, for funerals of relatives. By the end of the poem the memory gives way to lost sounds, in a cyclical turning away, a kind of driving away from the memory intoned in the earth, the sky, in the poem. For me, the poem reminds us of the need to memorialize, creatively through images, through language, through art, as to how and what memory might hold us to, inhere within us, in its imaginative extensions, its creative possibilities to draw us closer to the human sympathies, that in this poem might be reaching for an expression of loss.”
—Gordon Henry