O Trees
August 20th, 2010 § 2 Comments
O Trees
You have stood by me these two and a half years
and I still don’t know your names.
Nameless, you have steadfastly endured
beside me, slender, tall, always reaching
you rise straight up from the earth
past the concrete, the glass, to the sky.
At night you brush the soft grey light
You even out the clouds.
While I sleep, you are the roost of angels
In the day you pull down the sun
You suck it out of the sky
You entice it to stay
You hold the light in your arms while I sleep.
My sister Christine Ruth Wiebe wrote this poem when she was living in Chicago, on Tuesday, February 12, 1991.
Ann Hostetler and my mother Katie Funk Wiebe are working on a special issue of the Journal of the Center for Mennonite Writing focusing on Christine and Sylvia Bubalo, two writer/artists whose inspiring spiritual and artistic journeys deserve a wider audience. Both struggled with chronic illness as well. Christine’s flavor was systemic lupus erythematosus.
I have been going through Christine’s letters and writings to find poems which she never showed to anyone, and this is one of them. She also made the drawing, which was separate from the poem, but I joined them together here. For the most part I have preserved her punctuation, but I am thinking that had she lived to publish this poem, she probably would have added a few periods here and there.
Woman and Man
July 5th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Since 1971, my husband’s family has gathered every two years or so for a reunion named after our male progenitor, Ephraim Baer. I am president of the reunion for 2011, and I have renamed the event, the Ephraim and Lovina Baer Reunion.
I drew the rock on the left, in pencil, sometime in August, 1996. The actual rock is about four inches wide and it’s split in the middle.
I drew the rock on the right, in pencil, on July 26, 1996. The rock itself is about eight inches tall
These were rocks I picked up from a river bed somewhere in Connecticut.
Self-portrait, 1993
June 6th, 2010 § 1 Comment
In 1993 I won an award at the Silvermine Gallery in Wilton, CT, for a diptych, Two Letters. They were a pair of “envelopes”, a memorial to men and women who died under Stalin’s KGB. Each envelope bore a black and white photo of a prisoner in the upper right hand corner, like a stamp. Addresses were etched in a cryptic formal script. One was done on a nice creamy sheet of hot press Arches watercolor paper, the other on black scratchboard.
After I finished these two pieces, it was late May, and close to my June birthday. I was inspired to do something more personal, an envelope addressed to myself, using scratchboard as a medium. The photo is of myself at the age of three, standing on a chair between snowbanks at my grandparents’ back door in Blaine Lake, Saskatchewan. This portrait was made possible, one might say, because my grandmother Anna convinced her husband Jake to leave Russia in 1923, thus escaping the Great Purge of the Stalin years, which pretty well eradicated the family members which did stay there, although I have a Great Aunt Neta who survived the Siberian work camps and now lives in Berlin. The “return address” in the upper left corner is my birthdate and birthplace. The address in the middle is the word “Survivor”, scratched out in dramatic flourishes. I used rubber stamps and silver ink to create postmarks, and sealed it all with my thumbprint. Happy Birthday, Joanna Wiebe.
