Virginia Woods Bellamy's Gift
"Travel"
(a poem on passing from this world)
        

In my last column I wrote of Rufus Bellamy's mom, Virginia, having written a game-changing book on knitting designs in 1952, but it was Rufus' gift of one of his mom's poems that awakened me to what an exceptionally gifted artist his mother really was. The poem, "Travel" I found unique because it treats life's most feared experience, dying, with a lightness and calm as if dying were little more than closing up one's house for the winter. It then takes the reader on an imaginative journey through the cosmos that is truly remarkable.

The poem follows below:

If I lock my body-so-
Weave the arms at the elbow
Clamp the heels upon the bed,
Bolt the shoulders, nail the head
Close the lips and blind the brows -
Can I leave it? Like a house?

Can I cautiously retreat
--mirrors covered with a sheet,
Light excluded, echoes only
To prevent its being lonely-
Can I slip outside into Nothingness,
as owners do?

Leave it by a secret stair
By a door composed of air
And responsibility gone
Travel like a rich man's son?
Plunge across a tide of space,
Look a firmament in the face,

Swim in planetary light
Dance upon the wax of night
And forget I had been bound
By a labyrinth of sound
By a wall of blood and bone
House that I must call my own?

And forget that I must steer
Boats from somewhere else to there,
And forget that I must ride
Flesh where matter must decide
And forget that I must run
An engine lateral to the sun?

Once forgetting all of these,
Traversing now the Pleiades
Ascending light and breathing sun
Clothed by cold and tasting tone,
Would I become the beholding Mind?
Forget the empty house behind?

Seeing me upon my bed
They would come and hail me dead,
They would say the house has fallen
And the contents have been stolen.
They would level resently
All that had been named for me,

They would sigh that dust must go
Lost between the sun and snow,
In the cataract and thunder,
And with flowers would trample under
And with leaves would brush aside
Me!...on my celestial ride!

Virginia Woods Bellamy

          I'm especially taken by these lines:
"Plunge across a tide of space/ Look a firmament in the face// Swim in planetary light/ Dance upon the wax of night"

          How calm and fearless these lines are compared to this panicky speech of Claudio's in "Measure for Measure":” "Aye but to die/ And go we know not where/ To lie in cold obstruction and to rot/ This sensible warm motion to become a kneaded clod/ And the delighted spirit to bathe in fiery floods/ Or reside in thrilling regions of thick ribbed ice. /To be imprisoned in the viewless winds/ And blown with restless violence round about the pendant world,/ 'Tis too terrible! /The lowliest and most uncertain worldly life/ That age ache penury and imprisonment/can lay on nature/ Is a paradise to what we fear of death...”

          Virginia Bellamy must have been a woman of amazing faith to seem to believe, like Julius Caesar, "that Death, a necessary end,/Will come when it will come.” But I see no fear anywhere in her 'celestial ride'.

          I've written this article mainly to get Virginia Woods Bellamy recognized not just as a knitting authority. (Knitting seems to be becoming a lost art.) But I would hate to think Rufus' mom's fine poem should also be lost in the dust cloud of Time's relentless dash into the oblivion.

This piece in a slightly different form appeared in Wahpeton The Daily News

html edit 09-17-2021 and upload