Pendemic Word Crochet: 2020 Poems Hooked and Booked

By Vicki VanEck Hill

As a poem-packrat bride I vetoed merging newlywed life with writing . Groom Lou encouraged converting poems jotted on bank receipts, envelope flaps, forgotten locations, computer files, journals. {He’s featured in poems of happiness not grief/ 2009 widowhood/abandonment, praise/ comforting prayers).A 2018 surgery recuperation overlapped 2019-20 Covid home isolation. Lou insisted I quit delaying grasp a long-ago publication vision as his life changed radically surviving the Widowmaker heart attack. Our homebound honeymoon is bizarrely prolonged .

Thanks to Master Mechanic/Photographer/Helpmate gem spouse Lou Quondamatteo, Jr; the late Bob Dahl for his wiles to turn paper shards into kintsugi*. To heaven’s dearest rag-stabbers, Aunts Jo VanEck (sympathy pains at my birth) and Theresa VanEck Mak (I her Junior Bride, dubbed “1st kid” through 8 miscarriages before 4 children). Both aunts now are tailors to heavenly hosts. Also to my gone-too-soon Aunt Doris Mak, my 2-year “roomie” in Chicago home while a Moody Bible Institute student. I weekended at her North Side apartment before she moved to California, scarce years later to eternity. They with so many teachers mentors—Jack Ridl--encouraging me to publish

*kintsugi: Japanese art of Golden Repair, a poem within this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Feb 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781664251861

Vicki VanEck Hill

A self-taught reader at 3, the Author began to write early, too, on scraps of paper collected by an uncle with Parkinson’s in 1950s. English teacher and ESL tutor, she launched Kent County, MI, Head Start Family Literacy for 1400+ families; wrote professionally for prominent businesses, church coalitions, local governments. grants.

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Copyright © 2022 Vicki VanEck Hill.

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ISBN: 978-1-6642-5187-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-5188-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-5186-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021924544

WestBow Press rev. date: 02/22/2022

Contents

Alterations

Mellow Age

Mending Moms

Mourning Impaired

Re-Wired

Toppled

Bindings

A ¾ Heart In Time

Altered

Be Present

Bisgetti Challenge

Fruition

Happy New Year

Harbor

One Chair Care

One, Two, Three

Pray/Tell

Time Enfolding

Vitruvian Man

You’re The Salt

Garments of Faith

Prayer Assistance

All Souls Day 2006

November Now

Advent

Unto Us

Day One

Epiphany Sunday 2017

Slaughter of Innocence 12/12

Labyrinths Of Lent

I Can Only Imagine

Rest In My Loving Eyes

Wholly Weak

Thine Is The Glory

Spring Hopes Eternal

Star Prayers

Hemmed

After

April Fool

Climbing Boots And Baby Shoes

Flying Pig

Hands, Hearts Too

Hummingbird And Ox

Just Two

Plus And Minus

Pole Dancing

Quiet Things

Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda

The Toast

Uplifting Hands

Widowversary

Patterns & Prints

Bear Facts

Bird Brains

Bird Soup

Buttons

Comforters Come

Farm Arms

Hawkeyed View

Interrupted By The Mouse

Isn’t

Levitation Of Ladybugs

Nesting

Rumspringa

Sestina Sans Seraph

Small Goose

Quilt Squares

Catacombs To Basilicas

Conventional Forensics

Golden Repair

Joy Awaits

Land Of The Free

Manifold Works

Memory’s Morning Melange

Scraps Of Life

Though As Scarlet

To The Hound

Used Hearse

Who Walk In Darkness

Shears, Pins, Needles

2-4-6-8: 2018 Was Not So Great

Airs Above Ground

Frankenfoot

Greedy

His Choice: Not Dream Works

Horizontal Trees

Intincture

Nursey Not

Spikes

Wedgies

What Tools These Portals Be

Wound Clinic

Shore Wear

Blind Requiem; The Morning Watch

Breakers’ Breath

Cloud Nine

Cloud Rumble

Damsel Flies

Denuded Dunes

Early Enchantment

A Night In June Of The Strawberry Moon

Tuneless, Loonless

Percussion

Sandy Plie’

St. Simons Island 2011

Unaware

Snow Suited

All Things Wonderful

Derails

Leap Day Snow

Polar Vortex

Skeins

Snow Globe

Spring Hopes Eternal

Storm Creaks

Synecdoche Blades

Wet Dog Snow

Winterlude

Winter Shears

Threads

Deathwatch Beadle

Gloved Aunt

Gloved Nephew

Heavy Mettle

Lilies Of The Alley

Look, Vicki-See Spots Run

Nathan’s

Nav 90Th

Ruth’s Girls

Sacher Torte At 50

Scraps Of Life

Waco Watch

Yarns

Ekphrastic Dialogue: Maria Abakanowicz’s Drawing Face And Hand 1991

Ragman

Red Hot Inn

Bolt Ends

Wes: Beyond Fusion

A Bittersweet Adieu

Daymares

Death Foreshadowed

Leave-Taking

Midday

Parade Rest Of Life

Sifted Snows

Spilling Sorrow’s Sequins

Struggling To Calm

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Alterations

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GUILT GLISSADE

MELLOW AGE

MENDING MOMS

MOURNING IMPAIRED

RE-WIRED

TOPPLED

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Jahrzeit

One candle for each earthly year

Signifies a thousand tears

I’ve shed until tonight:

The first deathversary, called the jahrzeit.

You loved candles on twinkling winter nights

I’d line them up to welcome you dark nights

Though wintry winds so often gutted flames.

Now I listen for the wind to say my name

Which you shall never again proclaim

Unless I hear it in eternity.

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Mellow Age

Once I wore teddies, now I wear TEDS

Spike heels departed for double-tied Keds

Instead of hearing old rockers like the Grateful Dead

Listening to Brahms, I’m grateful none is known in obits I’ve read.

The thongs that I wear now perch on my feet

As I sip purified water, no stronger treat.

The bridges not burned are the only ones left

So many have passed on, I’m of dozens bereft.

Once weekends were prepped with a small bag, large bills,

Now in advance I pack bottles of pills.

I currently know funeral homes near and far

Swivel my prosthetic hips to enter or exit car

Instead of numbers of shower, wedding, baby cards, I buy

Get well or sympathy thoughts, sent with a personalized cry.

Gardening forsaken, prized flowerbeds fill with ferns,

Quick! Change the calendar! Another season turns!

If I weren’t having so much fun, I’d be in quite the jam:

Old age is always fifteen years older than I am.*

I hope my memory will be the last to go, that

I’ll recollect all I’ve written in each long-ago

Have love forever with me, not just acceptance as a fool,

That God will always bless me, others love me should I drool!

*A tip of the cane to Bernard Baruch

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Mending Moms

A modern mama stabs no rags

For a repair she’ll carry garments in bags

To a seamstress, tailor, dry cleaners

For hems or mends once done at home.

At the local antique store, what did I spy

Something newer generations couldn’t identify:

A darning egg often used by Mother

For worn socks of one of my four active brothers

With only two children I admit

I never darned socks, nor crocheted or knit

My Gran a dressmaker, two aunts were tailors

I never sewed till I married!

Here, Vic, I’ll finish one of three would say

Watching me wrestle a short project all day.

Once I told Gran that but for her skills I’d have learned to crochet

Her retort: "But you do! I use thread and hook,

but you know how to word-crochet"

You’d see the twinkle in her eyes as she spoke those words

The pride my heart still fills: hers my supreme writing compliment given

I’d be proud to show you my wedding hanky:

Tatting 8-inches borders a small linen square

Grandma moved in for a week with expectant me

before birth to sew an old-timey layette of

Kimonos, receiving blankets, spit-up or wash clothes,

each trimmed in tiny patterned crochet

For my baby girl who grew up with 7th grade home ec class required;

She embroidered Mom on a pincushion now

seriously perforated and worn—I keep it

For cross-stitch needles, buttons, fabric books made in blitz sewing years.

When dad left us without warning in death, she

flew from L.A.: her skills held me up

Organization, research, work with her Texas brother,

both comforted me, shared grief’s bitter cup

Despite their losses, they steadied me on, kept me held up:

God’s nearness, their love stitched me together starting mending of Mom

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Mourning Impaired

I indeed am comforted you died painlessly in sleep

Expert at crises, I checked all vital signs: BAD. just then I didn’t weep

More emotional were the 911 dispatchers who also loved you

Later I went numb with shock for a year, perhaps two.

So many months passed

Awaiting your return at last,

Presuming you were on an emergency distant call-out

That lasted till your shift began at 7 a.m. or thereabouts

The blue crept up your bare feet past ankles,

Along your jawline to ear: I marveled you’d not ever speak nor hear,

White rug’s small bloodspot where your head lay—

Made