In Their Own Words
C. Rees on “Quaker Carol Sing”
Quaker Carol Sing
Grandmother laughs at the silence of the meeting house.
She is alive with the faces of the dead.
Candles burn warped glass.
Great uncle presses his nose to a windowpane.
A flame swallows his right eye.
Hair damp with river water, he sings
Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming,
his mother’s evening song. We listen to dead voices,
listening as she listened for his absence in his absence,
as lye reddened her hands to blood and the years thinned.
Dusk passes under night’s current.
Snow fragments the westward-facing fire truck.
It has waited since ‘43, but this meeting house hasn’t burned.
My grandmother lifts her hand as if shape singing,
weighs each floorboard, each hard lack.
Our departure lifts old faces from darkened windows.
The silence is as much a cistern as the cemetery outside, its stones and oak.
Reprinted from NOCTUARY (Host Publications, 2026) with permission of the publisher.
On “Quaker Carol Sing”
Family recollections are like ghosts, threadbare and familiar, stitched from memories and documents, a weft of lost contexts, filled with gaps, hollows through which truth and narrative ebb. Three of my dead dwell in this poem: my paternal grandmother (Virginia Rees), a great uncle (Alfred Rees), and his mother (Mabel Kauth).
This poem also contains a more nebulous collective of the dead—an afterlife in the choral mode, where individuals become leaky, steeping with other dead until their particular differences blend together, only rising to complicate the chorus as recognizable figures to living eyes and ears. John Berger’s “Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead” is at work here. The dead enmesh the living in a timeless field, while the living, who form a core of space and experience, engage in a cryptic flow back and forth between themselves and the dead who envelop them.
They step out of the assembly, as in an Ancient Greek play, or in the Quaker meetinghouse where this poem roots. It is not set on a single evening, but conjures decades at Wrightstown Friends Meeting, specifically their annual carol sing. It’s a place bound up in family’s history at that meeting, which dates back to the early 1950s before my father was born, as well as to the dark history of Quaker and Lenni-Lenape interactions in the 17th and 18th centuries. The poem inhabits a continuum of nights, of the living and the dead, and of the complex context of personal and regional histories, resting in an ecstatic zone, the meeting house’s open flame candles and rippled handmade windowpanes, the hard benches arrayed in facing rows, the many voices filling the usually quiet space and trickling into dry winter through seams in glass, stone, and wood.
The earliest draft of “Quaker Carol Sing” dates back to June 2013, a month after my grandmother died, 49 years after Al’s mother died, and 70 years after Uncle Al himself drowned swimming across the Delaware River during a summer picnic above Washington’s Crossing, PA. It is perhaps the oldest poem in my forthcoming collection, NOCTUARY. Originally, this poem was fragmented into four sections, establishing borders between the present, the past, and the teeming liminal zone of death. Al exists only in the third section, and the dead are only broadly referenced throughout. Between that early draft and the poem as it manifests in NOCTUARY, it is the images that linger. Of its 21 lines, 17 existed in different shades in the 50 lines of the original poem:
“An ancient woman in back / laughs at the silence of the meeting house.”
“Grandmother laughs at the silence of the meeting house.”
—
“Snow fingerprints the lot’s / westward facing fire truck.”
“Snow fragments the westward-facing fire truck.”
—
“We leave greeting footfalls, voices / lifting old faces from dark windows.”
“Our departure lifts old faces from darkened windows.”
Usually, I write, much like I remember, in fragments. Inherited memories pull from buried sources, a narrowed flow from inaccessible groundwater, subterranean and dispersed, like how a spring wells up to the surface and seeps back into an aquifer. In my poetry, these inexact memories and stories become images, and between drafts they ebb and surge, and the images sometimes remain, though when put side-by-side they appear as dim doubles of each other.
Mabel Kauth, my great-grandmother, is missing from this draft, and her presence in the poem feels crucial, arriving with the first enjambments in a poem that seeks to contain itself in end-stopped, syntactical lines as unbroken as pews in a row, which cannot deny this moment of intimate and supernatural rupture. Her moment of continuous grieving taps into death’s porousness—we listen as she listened for the dead, her son, even as she too dwells among the dead who surround us.
