Barbara Hamby: Ode on Killing Sadness 

In the nursing home in Havana I can’t help but think
of my mother, who would be 91,
as I take each old woman’s hand and say “hola,”
or “buenas tardes,” and I notice one lady
who is sitting off to the side with a look that says,
“No one is going to say hello to me,”
so I walk over and take her hand, and she sits up
and kisses me on the cheek, a hard peck
just like the kamikaze kisses of my mother,
and through my tears I hear her say,
“You’re weak like your daddy,” and I am weak,
because I still miss her so much
after five years, and I kiss the Cuban woman’s cheek
and I want to take her home with me
but we don’t even speak the same language,
which you could have said about me
and my own mother, and all these women in Havana
have raised better daughters than I was,
and I feel like the creatures in Roberto Fabelo’s
drawings, a woman with wings, yes,
but with the head of a bird, and a couple of nights
before we saw the Buena Vista
Social Club, and the emcee said at the start
of the evening, “Here we are killing
sadness,” and the music did take the sting
out of the night, and I’m thinking of this
when we go to the cemetery and see the tomb
of Amelia Goyri, who died in childbirth
and was buried with her son between her legs,
whose husband came every day
with flowers, and two years later when his own
father died, and the tomb was opened, 
he begged to have his wife’s coffin unsealed,
so he could see his beloved once again,
and when they pulled back the lid the child
was in his mother’s arms. A miracle?
Who knows, but hundreds of plaques surround
the tomb in gratitude for miraculous
births, restored eyesight, banished cancers,
and the man who takes care of the site
says he has seen men step out of wheelchairs
and women throw away crutches,
and on top of the tomb a marble woman
is holding a child, and a living woman
with bright red hair shuffles up to the statue,
touches the baby’s bottom, and backs
away from the tomb praying for her own
miracle, and I say a prayer
for my mother whose hard kisses were so sweet
and ask her to let me tell her story
as I know it, and when I stand near her grave
three months later on an island in the Pacific,
I will thank her again for the hard kiss she sent
special delivery through the little grandma
in the rest home in Havana, Cuba, another island
in the middle of an enormous sea.

Copyright 2021 Barbara Hamby. From Holoholo (2021, University of Pittsburgh).

Barbara Hamby was born in New Orleans and raised in Honolulu. She is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Holoholo (Pitt, 2021). She has also edited an anthology of poems, Seriously Funny (Georgia, 2009), with her husband David Kirby. She teaches at Florida State University where she is Distinguished University Scholar.