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Eleanor May Mackintosh (1886-1963) : In Memory

We will not weep for her:
Through tears, God’s gift, the heart clear-eyed in praise
Reaches back for a young girl
Growing straight and tall in nor’west weather.
Milk-can carting, firewood hauling in the wild bush,
Family life and laughter and hard work
In heat-baked, frost-cracked Oxford
Shapes her free and strong

We will not weep for her:
Even in sadness the heart has joy
In the capable woman called from a grand house
To marry a Scottish carpenter.
Roots going deep into (for one of them new-found) love of God
Steady they stand
Riding the good times and the hard
Seeing the summers and the children come.

We will not weep for her:
Now especially the heart has thanks
For the good wife watching the girls
Under the backyard apple trees.
Pruned and tended carefully as these
In time they came to blossom and bore fruit.
‘For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health…’
In this, and all, she knew the words, and lived them.

We will not weep for her:
Always for memory the heart has praise.
Patience, longsuffering, peace: not only these
Fruits of the Spirit in her spirit ripened.
Courage and calm; a stubborn, loving pride;
A faith child-wondering yet solid as a rock;
And, even to the last leaf-fallen years, her wit
(A wax-eye alert and bright in the gnarled old tree)
For these, and all, we give God praise.

A link with the past
Snaps
A link with the future is forged.
The dry cocoon bursts in the sunlight of heaven.
She is made new.
She has seen the Lord.

Now the tables are turned.
Newborn now, she waits for our dying.
There is one more welcomer for us
in the heavenly land.
Now, more truly herself than we have ever known her
She waits.
Until we meet again.

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