Portrait of a Navajo Grandmother

It was my honor to create this piece for a Navajo family, commissioned by their good friend M.M.   It is my best effort at likeness of their Grandmother, who had a wonderful face.  She is depicted with twin lambs.

Portrait of a Navajo Grandmother, in Kato Polyclay, about 14" tall.  

While searching

My lover is the silence of time, 

from whom is concieved 

enormity. 

I am the raging of ashes. 

You, who might have been he,  

are not here. 

 

~ Lou Rogers 

 

While searching for a couple of poems for my Aunt's memorial, I came upon one my mother wrote. My father had been many years gone when she wrote it. No one ever stepped into his place in her life. Indeed, it summarizes much about her life, and that also of a friend who died by her own hand in 2005. When there is no living human center in a life, there is sometimes in the end a simply a merciful closing of the book. For all those who stand alone in the hollow of the world, peace.

 

By Lou Rogers

Faraway

Now at this hour my Aunt's memorial is happening, faraway. I could not be there in person, but thoughts are there. She was my father's twin sister. Though she and he departed many decades apart, in a sense I feel they went hand in hand, for they both chose their deaths, and chose to die in water. A river and a lake, beautiful and loved. He was 35 years old, she was 90. There is a kind of poetic mirroring, these two so close and so far.

 

Next time I shall die
Bringing forth wings and feathers like angels;
After that, soaring higher than angels-
What you cannot imagine
I shall be that.

                             ~ Rumi