Remembrance
Susan Keith
Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse 2006 (view all the winners)
First Prize
Do you remember my voice?
Whispering hushed breathlessness,
soft, polite, but pointed.
Elocution elicited eloquence.
It was evocative, at times, provocative.
Do you remember my tone?
A mélange built from
mortar of Miss Porter's,
purrs preferred at Vassar,
and Parisian poets salon songs
picked up at the effete elite Sorbonne.
No Mamie drone, nor Bess mono
tone, nor Lady Bird’s chirpy Southern
drawl. God forbid, no "you alls."
I was the "inquiring photographer"
for the Washington
Times Herald.
That's when I met Jack.
I was thirty-one when he won.
TV loved my young tanned man
squeezing victory from sweating VP Nixon
in Nineteen Sixty.
The youngest "First Lady,"
I despised that title, sounded
like I needed a bridle.
Do you remember his inauguration?
A triumphant fiasco.
Gloriously the first to
include a poet and the once banned
black singer, Marian Anderson.
Her voice soared when she sang
the National Anthem at them.
The audience roared for her
and later for Jack when he asked them
to ask what they could do for their country.
Did you remember the chaos that day?
Cardinal Cushing spoke his invocation
through unincensed smoke.
The lectern burned from
a hidden heater below.
And Robert Frost tried
to read a poem, Dedication,
composed just for the inauguration.
But Frost was old then,
on that cold day.
His new poem heralding
the young leader was too new for him
to read. The sun's glare blinded
him and instead he recited The Gift
Outright from memory.
Or do you only remember Dallas?
I was not prepared
for the Texas heat
that Friday
in late
November. They
had forecast a chill.
The Texas trip was my first
since our son Patrick was born
and died. Four months of
grievous seclusion ended
on that bright sunny day.
On Love Field's black
tarmac, I knew my pink
(or was it raspberry?)
woolen Chanel
(or was it Schiaparelli?)
suit and pill box hat
were too hot.
We went to heal
political wounds.
So Governor Connally
and his wife rode with us
in the open air of the
midnight blue
Lincoln. Its top and bullet-proof
side windows rolled down.
Jack liked it that way.
The Johnsons drove behind.
The streets were packed.
Crowds swarmed Dealy Plaza
when we turned on to
Elm Street at 12:30 pm.
The first crack of a gun
and Jack grabbed his neck,
his astonished face turned toward mine.
Connally slumped back into his wife’s lap.
Our car
did not accelerate.
Another shot.
Jack’s head exploded.
A plume of my husband's
blood, brains and skull fragments
covered me. He leaned
motionless into my side.
I tried to save him.
The car filled
with bloody yellow and red roses,
petals and gore all over us.
It was all over for us.
Seven minutes later
he still had a heart
beat, but it stopped.
Last rites performed at 1 pm
That’s when I told
them to announce he'd
died. Walter Cronkite
and the nation cried.
Do you remember Johnson's swearing in?
They wanted me to
take off my blood and gore splattered
suit and stockings.
I would not.
I wanted America to see
what they had done to him.
They wanted me to sleep
and proffered pills.
I would not.
I needed a clear head
to plan, to ensure
John F. Kennedy's funeral
would be likened to Lincoln’s.
I stayed with Jack through
that night, never changing my suit.
We arrived at the White House
Saturday morning at 4:30 am.
At my request, the East Room
had been dressed as it was
when Lincoln laid in repose.
Black crepe covered the chandeliers.
Jack's coffin rested on Lincoln's catafalque.
They wanted an open casket.
His face had been spared, but
he was waxen. I wouldn't agree
for America to see him that way.
We opened the coffin
in private on Saturday morning.
I placed in it with him
three notes, one from me,
the other two from our children.
I laid a piece of Scrimshaw and
a pair of cuff links inside.
I cut a lock of his hair.
We closed the coffin.
Do you remember Sunday?
We followed him to the Capitol Rotunda
where Jack would lay in state.
John John played in someone's
office. He couldn't hold still.
Caroline and I approached his coffin together,
and knelt. I kissed the flag
as Caroline slipped her hand under.
I ached. I wanted to keen, scream, kill.
My face was still, motionless.
By then the triple named assassin
had met his own assassin.
Bobby and I came back to Jack that night.
We returned to the White House to prepare
for the state funeral on Monday—
our National Day of Mourning,
a cortege from the Capitol Rotunda
to St. Matthews Cathedral
to Arlington National Cemetery,
to the place where we had buried
Patrick four months before.
Do you remember?
Monday was a blur.
An obstinate rearing riderless horse,
bearing my father’s nickname—
Black Jack. John John's salute,
caisson wheels creaking,
horse hooves clomping,
marine band's drumming,
bagpipes mournful moaning.
Twenty-one jarring jolting gun shots,
and then I lit his flame eternal.
I lost my composure in public
once in those four days.
She sang Ave Maria at
our wedding and again at
the Cathedral. That's when I cried.
Did you see it as a betrayal?
After they slaughtered Bobby too,
I feared for my children.
I married a Greek
bearing gifts
of seclusion, privacy, protection
from flashing bulbs and guns.
I was no longer Kennedy prey.
Onassis ended my name and fears.
Then Ari died.
I stayed a widow
and died quietly at home,
cancer in my blood,
probably there dormant
since Jack died.
I was sixty-four;
he would have been seventy-seven.
To us all he will always be forty-six.
I was buried by his side.
