When Irene Latham came to town...

...she was wearing a red floral skirt and biker boots, which spoke to me of both a femininity and a toughness that I admire about her as a person, and that I admire about her work.  Irene was just the inspiration to prompt folks to write during our writer residency portion of the GPL Book Arts Project.  Students quilted poetry out of emotions and memories, bloggers noted forgotten thoughts on the backs of a scraps of paper, a men’s group began planning an Easter sunrise service that will include participants reading bits of poetry about rebirth, renewal and love…

Irene Latham is an author whose storytelling has such depths and richness, a reader can get completely lost in the words.  Both her poetry and her prose remind us of life’s greatest pleasures and pains, the things that round us out and make us who we are.  Love and loss.  The colors of nature and the changing of the seasons. The smells and the tastes that trigger memories.  I don’t have to tell you anymore, right?  You know exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you? 

One of my all-time favorite poems happens to be one penned by Irene (and may be found in her book The Color of Lost Rooms), a love poem entitled Black Shaw Remembers Crazy Horse (reprinted here with permission of Irene Latham):

The old ones like to say

memory is like riding a trail

at night with a lighted torch.

And so it does not surprise me

that your face has been swallowed

by darkness, your voice black as

the wounded wings of a crow.

But sometimes the torch flares,

illuminating the way your body

folded itself against mine,

how the last time you loved me

you dipped your thumb in red paint

and covered the part in my hair,

marking me a woman greatly loved.

When the rattlesnake came into

the lodge, you could not crush it.

And you couldn't save our daughter

from the white man's coughing disease.

In the end, the Black Hills were lost, too -

the heart of everything that is.

I wasn't your only wife. But I am

the one who remembers. I whisper

your name and it drifts as snow

across the prairie, then melts

and is gone.

I especially love the image “memory is like riding a trail at night with a lighted torch,” and “sometimes the torch flares.”  Memory is just like that.  So perfectly said.

On this International Women’s Day, I celebrate the women I know and love by reading Irene Latham’s The Color of Lost Rooms.  For additional information about Irene, please visit her website here, and her blog here.