Sparklers - Barbara Crooker

We’re writing our names with sizzles of light

to celebrate the fourth. I use the loops of cursive,

make a big B like the sloping hills on the west side

of the lake. The rest, little a, r, one small b,

spit and fizz as they scratch the night. On the side

of the shack where we bought them, a handmade sign:

Trailer Full of Sparkles Ahead, and I imagine crazy

chrysanthemums, wheels of fire, glitter bouncing

off metal walls. Here, we keep tracing in tiny

pyrotechnics the letters we were given at birth,

branding them on the air. And though my mother’s

name has been erased now, I write it, too:

a big swooping I, a little hissing s, an a that sighs

like her last breath, and then I ring

belle, belle, belle in the sulphuric smoky dark.

I’m remembering the feeling of getting that lit sparkler in your hand as a child, the sudden pressure you feel to use it meaningfully somehow before it’s gone, how the burning hiss of it adds audio to your urgency. You try to get a whole word out before the first letter vanishes or scratch out a sentence or you lose your head and race around the yard squiggling it wildly before it is smoke and fumes, leaving you panting and dissatisfied.

Two years ago, when we were gathered as an extended family out on the front porch lighting our own fourth of July sparklers, I remembered this poem and shared it with you, Mom. I was thinking then of your mom, my Oma, sweetly missed on these occasions. I scrawled Oma with my sparkler in the dusk, then Mom, and Abby, and a series of messy childish hearts all swirled together. It felt at once meaningful, playful, and silly.

It didn't feel like a foreshadowing, but now that memory looms portentous and strange. I would never have thought only a year later your sparkle would be out.  The smoke you left behind is recent and thick, swirling in the air, burning my nose, and stinging my eyes.

How panicked and dissatisfied I would be, if the universe was simply this: a dazzlingly chaotic Trailer Full of Sparkles, each a vivid flash that could never make the sense it should. But I believe, as you did, that this massive locked trailer full of crazy, wheeling, bouncing, glittering sparkles matters and makes sense. And I believe that each human spark will be found to have written in some glorious way, with or without trying, the same great Name that kindled it for that very purpose.

When I reflect on your life, Mom,  I love to see how vividly you wrote that Name, in all its forms, over and over again in this dark world. How you taught us all the worthiness of making that our life's obsession: to learn the names of God and write them using the light He kindled within us, with ever greater clarity and beauty.

The best part is knowing that your spark, extinguished here, is blazing eternally in the presence of the God we both love to name.

I'll keep practicing my penmanship here. See you soon!

How the sadness of
a single human life
compounds with time.

How in a generation, maybe two if we are lucky--

the way our mouths wrinkle into
laughter, the way we can't remember
which dishes go where for the
thousandth time, the way our bodies
have pulsed with rage over small
injustices, the way we cannot hold our
liquor, hold our excitement, hold our
children long enough--

everything is annihilated with the
delicate memories of our loved-ones.

-Paul Cheney