Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome back Chicago poet Wilda Morris, previously featured in our “Space” (as a member of the P2 Collective) and “Family” issues. “Christina” is a contemplation of the life of her great-grandmother, who immigrated from Denkendorf, Germany and died in a fire in rural America. If we are lucky, we have pictures of our ancestors, but the particulars of their stories are inevitably lost, leaving us with questions and haunted symbols of their lives. The facts, if they remain, don’t tell us how they felt. “Did you sigh to leave in springtime,/ hillsides coated with wildflowers, trees budding?/ Did your heart ache to forsake friends and kin?” Wilda wonders how her great-grandmother was treated by men on her long journey and what her relationship with Felix, her husband, was like in those very different times. She reverences her grave, reaching for a signal from beyond. “I listen for a whisper from the past,/ for your heartbeat beneath the grass, Christina.” We are included in this heartfelt communication between the generations and Wilda gives us the sense that not so much time has passed, that if we listen, we will hear the motion of our ancestors in the ground of our own souls.
Read “Christina” in Synkroniciti’s “Haunting” issue, , available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
If Wilda Morris is strange in any way, she says she has come by it naturally; her maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Strange so she must be at least one/fourth strange. Wilda adopted 5 children, who have given her 15 grandchildren. She has served as president of both the Illinois State Poetry Society and Poets & Patrons of Chicago. She is widely published in journals and websites. Wilda’s three published books of poetry are Szechwan Shrimp and Fortune Cookies: Poems from a Chinese Restaurant; Pequod Poems: Gamming with Moby-Dick; and At Goat Hollow and Other Poems. The latter is a book about family, focused on her Uncle Norman, the only uncle who had no children of his own.