Poems For Ula

Ula Marguerite Podesta Chalmers June 08 2007 December 10 2023

My daughter Amanda has written the most beautiful obituary celebrating Ula.
https://necrocanada.com/obituaries-2023/canada-ontario-toronto-ula-marguerite-podesta-chalmers-june-08-2007-december-10-2023

For my granddaughter. One day we’ll read Poems to Ula by water. Meanwhile cellist Lucas Tenzen and I perform my poem “In Light” for her: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=groiPy9t81M.

Thoughts & prayers do console, as does poetry.

A Wake

       for Ula Marguerite Podesta Chalmers

Feel the net, the nest, the next step
holding beloved Ula, her family and
friends as we move beyond closing in
to opening up, opening out to all that

cannot be known while we remain in
body. We can wholly feel Ula in all her
gentle, generous intensity, her fierce
love, her expanding field. As she enters

the Unknown, leaving in the wake of her
laugh, her sky-lit smile’s radiance, our hearts.
Ready to receive everything she is and would
have been. Ready to carry on what she

completed before her time, what we in our
small view considered her time.  May such
Intelligent Beauty and Joy ever trump grief as
her smile expands to every possible horizon.

May pain be left behind while we are carried
forward in her Wake and held in the larger bowl
of Being.  With her.  Without her.  And truly
with her.  Beauty, inner and outer.  Beauty.

BELIEVE…

In the space of a year she has learned to sit,
to stand, to walk, to totter forward in a run.

She has seen one full round of the seasons.
She wraps her family round her little finger.

Now just before dusk we stroll hand in hand
to witness the pelicans’ evening beach patrol.

Gliding over the sea in formation, skimming
just overhead, flapping slow time, in synch.

Ula studies the procedure, dropping my hand
to edge forward, neck outstretched, arms aero-

dynamically angled.  She flaps and flaps along
the sand, following the pelican flight, ready

for that sudden lift.  Again, again, till the last
pelican has flown.   Dragging her heels home,

Ula braces her body against the rising breeze,
bewildered that she too can’t take off to sky

but game to try again tomorrow…

Her Orbit of Ellipsis

My granddaughter is going as Wonder Woman
for Halloween. She’s practised swinging her
Lariat of Truth so I’m reading up on Artemis,

protectress of young girls and the archetype for
our current Wonder Woman. Arrow to hand, she
alights on the mark, drawing her bow on intruders.

Artemis herds young artoi, girls of eight or so away
from polis, the city, into wide, wilder woods where she
reigns Queen and they her willing apprentices stay

snared till puberty. Artoi, little Bears, they follow
their Great Bear into the chase and Orion hides,
the hunter hunted and flung out to constellation.

My granddaughter will go trick or treating and
return with a gleeful sack full of eternal returns.

Such small cosy comforts subside as the year slips
at an entrance to enchantment, the larger dark
that awaits us all. And the Greater Bear grins.