His Heart Was In Sweet Eleuthera: A Memory

RTL, 1919-2001.

There's a grave where an old man's body lies among strangers. Nobody visits it much. 

It's odd how people the old man lived with and loved and died among were strangers to him as well but it is so-save only one of his who was there at the last.

In the end, they turned out his pockets for spare change and forgot all about

 

who he was

and what he'd been 

and the place he came from

and the battles he fought

and the dreams he dreamed

and the dreams that died 

and what he thought about 

and what he stood for 

and who his people were 

and what he'd done in his life

and the things that angered him

and the children he'd held

and the women he'd loved

and the feel of sweet Eleuthera's soft sand under the bare feet of his boyhood

and the smell of sweet Eleuthera's blossoms

and the slap of sweet Eleuthera's ripples against the hull

and the cries of sweet Eleuthera's market women

and the heat of sweet Eleuthera's noonday sun and the shade of her plazas

and the silence of sweet Eleuthera's circling gulls

and the roar of sweet Eleuthera's long Atlantic combers

if they'd ever thought about it at all.

He lies on a snowy hillside in a sad and brooding northern place where winter's gray clouds press up against dark forests  far from sweet Eleuthera.

Sweet Eleuthera-in the blue southern ocean-is where his spirit rests.

*Eleuthera is Greek for "freedom".