Rachel Hadas: Fingernails

Vanessa Redgrave thought whatever
separates life and death
is tiny as the sliver of a fingernail.
She said this not in mourning nor acceptance
but matter-of-factly.  The occasion
was the tenth anniversary of her daughter’s death.
The topic was mortality.
 
Fingernail.  I remembered Hopkins’s “Moonrise”:
I awoke in the midsummer not-to-call night, 
    in the white and the walk of the morning,
The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe 
    of a fingernail held to the candle
Of paring of paradisiacal fruit…
 
A mother’s thoughts about the loss of her daughter
rendezvoused with a poetic fragment
in a kind of moonlit tryst, a meeting halfway
between nowhere and everywhere,
as the mind is everywhere and nowhere.
Grief slides into an ache that spreads and loops
into the rhythm of our mortal days:
fears, regrets, joys, hopes;
precarious contingencies;
that tiny sliver praise.
 
     -
 
      

Copyright 2020 Rachel Hadas. First published in Hopkins Review Spring/Summer 2020. Included in Vox Populi by permission of the author.

Rachel Hadas’s many books include Questions in the Vestibule and Poems for Camilla. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the O. B. Hardison Poetry Prize, among other honors. Hadas is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers University–Newark.