Pumpkin Season
for Daniel

It was in a Ford Cortina, you tell me, back in '73,
when you were just seven and Julie five,
both in the back of the car, Margaret in front,
that you all came to a pact with your dad:
the first of you four to die would send back
word, if there was an after world - a pumpkin
would appear the next day, sure sign.

It was autumn you think, glitter rock in the charts,
and of course pumpkins, orange, globular,
were synonymous with death in an American
ersatz way, and with Halloween when the veil
between the living and the dead grows thin,
when ancestor worship and vegetable lanterns
and bonfires light-in the gloom of the dying year.

Decades later, in Kefalonia, in a car again,
your father John was quiet; then days later, the call:
his sudden death. Next morning, true to the pact
you went to the garden and looked for that pumpkin,
like Cinderella looking for her Disney-colour coach.
But your father was right, he told you:
'Religion is man-made.' No pumpkin there.

Months later, a medium gives your cousin
a message from John: 'Religion is man-made,
but something does happen to you after you die,
and something else,' she says, 'he's waving,
yes, he's waving a pumpkin.' Years go by,
the pumpkin now become a personal myth,
this tale much told, and even part of a poem,

while somewhere back in '73 your father,
glimpsing his future story narrated, his death
held up, like a pumpkin lantern flickering in mirrors
reflecting mirrors, to ward off dark spirits,
pushes his family into the future with an ember
to keep alight and to pass on. And yes,
he's smiling still, and he's waving a pumpkin.

© Jacqueline Mézec

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