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Last Updated: Feb 13, 2017 - 1:45:37 AM |
Merry-go-round, with its ups and Downs
For Muriel Eiliff Frazier Eneas
3 December 1920 to 17 May 2016
I late
had ta wait
away in Zimbabwe
had to wait to get the news
and until now for inspiration
Muriel Eneas has passed away at 95
Iron Weed I was watchin’
jus’ finish
her three children,
a dentist and two doctors
and her and me, all Fiskites,
all Fisk graduates
Meharry Medical College,
across the street from Fisk
is where her husband,
Dr. Eneas, studied and taught
what days I recall
between these two campuses
there in Nashville
recall also, times
at St. Anne’s High School
she was our music teacher
owe
my attachment
to classical music,
my knowledge of it,
to her having introduced us
another world opened then
and just expanded
and has not stopped expanding yet
what great big heaps of snow
mounds and mounds of snow
on Fisk campus,
parts of two winters, 1985,
that one year I attended,
January to December
way down south, in Tennessee,
did not expect such severe snow fall
but there it was, that white surprise
gift of mounds and mounds
of white white snow
beneath mounds of earth
upon the island of New Providence
what remains of her
and her late husband
side by side,
death uniting them again
it is the life they lived though,
the work they did,
the lives that they together impacted
what nation builders they were
and without having been politicians
their impact to do with cultivation
bringing beauty,
making sensitive,
helping those whose lives they touched
to realize their humanity
that much more fully
impact, contribution they made,
not easy to be measured
so she was born in 1920,
seven years after my dad
who dies at ninety…
three years after my mom
who died at 69…
lived about as long as Marc Chagall,
Russian painter who died in France
she certainly shined a light
into my life and into a nation
may she rest in peace
born in the USA, in Savannah, Georgia
what a gift to The Bahamas she was
what a gift she was to all the world
this poem of Muriel Eneas
would not be complete
without the word, refinement,
word which she personified
hitchhiking from St. Anne’s
after school, one afternoon
she stopped her great big LTD
her and me and Mozart in the car
I can recall
its off-white, leather upholstery
shortly after that
I acquired a cassette tape
of four Mozart piano concertos
coincidentally it was when
I was at Fisk, studying,
fourteen years later, in 1985
when it ceased to play
I lent it to a friend at Fisk,
another Fiskite,
he returned it to me not working
tape in that cassette I cherished, broke,
was no more good
it was then when
I had to upgrade
to having those piano concertos
by Mozart on CD
here in chilly Zimbabwe,
I hear from nephew, Vaughn Scriven,
that role model of so many, Muriel Eneas,
has passed away
what though
of what of her that cannot-
that shall be with us always
part that cannot-
that shall not ever pass away
that shall not ever be forgotten
© Obediah Michael Smith, 2015
Saturday 2:21 a.m. 21.05.16
© Copyright 2016 by thebahamasweekly.com
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