Gratitude Monday: her own lives

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month comes from the pen of the 39^th President of the United States, who announced last month that he was returning to his home in Plains, Ga., accepting only palliative care as he awaits death. Because today I’m grateful for the life of Jimmy Carter.

Carter will probably go down in history more for his humanitarian work after he left the White House, but his entire life was a consistent journey of following his faith, which called on him primarily to be a decent human being. He is certainly that. (That decency may have set him up for the ratfuckery of Republicans who played with the lives of American hostages held in Iran in order to win the 1980 election for Ronald Reagan—not much has changed in the past 40 years, eh?)

It would be difficult to find another president who displayed the grace, humility and kindness of Jimmy Carter. I rather suspect that these days, if you have those qualities, you don’t go into politics. So I’m grateful to have had him as an example.

“A Motorcycling Sister” is about his actual sister, Gloria Carter Spann. Spann died in 1990 from pancreatic cancer, and her headstone reads as Carter limns it, so I’m assuming the rest of the poem is true, too.

“A Motorcycling Sister”

Her lives were always, simply said, her own,
So no one ever knew which one we’d come
To find—a charming southern lady who
was dressed for tea, or one who made her home

A pad for biker gangs, Daytona bound,
Who’d stop and sometimes stay a week, as though
They’d found a mother—one who rode with them
on many trips. Once, down in Mexico,

She broke her leg, which kept her home awhile
But gave her extra time to freeze and can
Her garden’s harvest for the crowds that came,
And ate, and slept on floors, then rode again.

Her final illness filled our town with men,
Leather-jacketed, with beards, who stayed
In shifts, uneasy, in her darkened room.
Telegrams were sent. The hears was led

To graveside by those friends, two by two,
With one ahead: in all by thirty-seven
large and noisy bikes. And on her tomb
They had inscribed SHE RIDES IN HARLEY HEAVEN.