Part One
The Remembrance

She said a year ago or so, when I had returned to Huancayo,
the old lady, as I knew here, above me in her apartment-
she said, "You've been gone long, nice to see you back."
When I first met her, was when I first bought the place
the apartment up high in the Andes to get far away from
everybody and everything, able to shift my concentration
on my writings. I now recall some simple things, her walking
down those steps, one by one around the garden where I
and my wife, had cloths lines, those we took down. And so,
there she walked pass, and walked across the street, sat
on a bench lean against the brick building, that harbored a
grocery store-the morning sun rising, the cool chilled wind
restlessly wrestling with the rays of the sun, and she'd stare
in solitude, perhaps wave as I walked by, her daughter
occasionally by her side, then one day she up and died, I
heard a knock at the door, her daughter stood there, and
I knew without her saying, something was very wrong. At seventy-seven, she died, just like that, she up and died,
had come to earth, did what she had to do, what she could,
and left, that was that (Soledad was her name).

Part Two
The Rowboat

Just an old lady, one of many, in a rowboat, going down
down, down the old river, sometimes fast, sometimes slow,
down she rows and rows and rows, and along this journey
an oar breaks, water seeps through the cracks-like an old
body, cascading, collapsing-yet still she rows on down the
river, as if it was a route, established inside her fleshly shell
as if in a prison, soon to be let out. And she rows, and rows
with one oar left, getting older along the way, her hair thinning,
her spirit fading, the light in her eyes pale, dull, but stormy at times, yet she has not forgotten the plight, her apartment,
her nest, her child's voice, and Jesus Christ.

"What shall we do, with this story?" she asks herself-perhaps a rhetorical question, but somewhere along the line (she knows it's her story and no one else's, and she is running out of time).

White water waves, the rapids, from the river keep coming up alongside her boat, arriving, and pouring over its side, its rim, filling the inner part of the vessel, and she knows now, life has an end, and it's near. Then at last she sees what others are blind to, home, where she originally came from, the night before the storm, the night before she was born.

Part Three
The Elegy

The sorrows of loss, rains down upon the living, it will go on and on for sometime, shadows of ones loss, are always left behind, where once we had thought the world and its surrounding universe could not do without... but in time we'll get along. There will be some smoky nights, crouched crying, like suffering mammals in a fire, but we get along, because we're on that same river, in a similar rowboat, just going down, down, down the watercourse, and soon we'll break a paddle-for we all do, it is how it is, how it was meant to be, how it has always been, we can't change it, we can only pray, and thank the Lord for those warm and cool days, and for a mother whom he let for us, for a short while.

Written 9-20-2008, in the morning, 24-hours after the old lady, Solitude, died up stairs, while in the hospital, dedicated to her and her daughter, from El Tambo, Huancayo, Peru No: 2487 By: Dr. Dennis L. Siluk