Barbara Ostrander

I have been knocked sideways by the sad news of the passing of my friend poet Barbara Ostrander which occurred at her home in Lexington, Kentucky, peacefully, on the afternoon of Friday, August 12. Barbara was age 49. I along with a number of other internet poets were concerned that we had not heard from her for some time. I had known that her cancer prognosis had worsened at the end of last year, and that the regimens she had been under were not working. I had tried to e-mail Barbara on a number of occasions over the past several months. I finally found an e-mail address for her husband Kent Ostrander this past Tuesday and contacted him. Kent gave me the sad news that Barb had died eleven days earlier.

I had the privilege of knowing Barbara from the fall of 2003 onward after I met her through Merseyside performance poet Jim Bennett's Poetry Kit e-mail list, having first come in contact with Jim around the time of my visit to Merseyside in August 2003 for the Jack the Ripper convention at the Liverpool Britannia Adelphi Hotel. I began to learn what an incredible person she was through the featured poet pages for Barbara on the PK website.

Learning that Barbara was coming to Bethesda outside of Washington, D.C., where I work, in order to come for cancer treatment at the National Institutes of Health, I arranged to meet her. It turned out that we met in the aftermath of the remains of Hurricane Isabel raging through Washington and Maryland on Saturday, September 20, I braved signal outages on Georgetown Pike to get to her hotel... though Barbara, pioneer and world traveller that she was, wanted to know what all the fuss was about. A couple of my poems below refer to the evening.

Follow the link through the title above for a website dedicated to Barbara that has been set up by Charlene Dewbre.



Transfusion

To Barbara

I. Intaglio

A fire inside the stone,
an image engraved in a dark gem.
You're an ICU nurse; on your arm,
you wear a picc, a plastic lizard.

We meet in the lobby of the Sheraton,
my Kentucky woman in black, in dark glasses,
in Bethesda to receive your cancer treatment.

You've climbed Kilimanjaro twice,
shot your own zebra,
whose hide hangs on your wall,
cared for Rwandan war victims.
You tell me how you broke
protocol to whisper to the dying
woman whose family had been herded
from the room, to tell her God loved her.

You, the Kenyan white girl, tell me
about your trip to India and Nepal.


II. India

You bathe the four-year-old boy with scabies
in the city they call "The Armpit of India,"
his head an open sore of green pus,
a battlefield for the microscopic mite.

Scabies everywhere on the orphans:
buttocks, fingers, ears, legs.
The feast of Dasain, everything
closed, even the pharmacy,

so you and Mary Ellen rummage
for cotton bales, an antipyuretic
for their fevers, calamine lotion
for their itching.

You drag the infected mattresses
from the orphanage, set them on fire.
Sparks drift like spirits to the stars.


III. Transfusion

Barbara, I can't stop the tumor growing in your lung
and neither can the new chemo the Feds tried.
I'm grateful that instead of flying home,
you stay to attend my lecture.
They've removed the picc from your arm; you rejoice
at the prospect of a shower, your first since February.

Now, next morning, I slosh through still-dark Baltimore
as you get ready to take your flight back to Kentucky.
As I think about you, I almost miss my turn
at Poe's marble grave to head to Washington,
the line of rear lights ahead,
red corpuscles flowing
into the nation's body politic.

Christopher T. George


-- The preceding poem appears in the Poets Gone Wild anthology just published.



Traveller - For Barbara

You were the voyager, going
where I could not go, passport
stamped with tumors and chemo doses.

You spoke of your fellow patients,
how you shared the rollercoaster
of hope renewed and hope lost.

You and I shared a hurricane's aftermath,
when powercuts blacked out Bethesda,
ate in the Mongolian grill, where

you told me of climbing Kilimanjaro.
But now you journey farther:
footsteps in the snow, solo.

Christopher T. George

**************************


Sunburst

The sun bursts from behind clouds piled
high above the National Postal Museum,
and I watch a pigeon strut between
scurrying commuters at Union Station.

I wonder at this God who could
take you from us at so young
an age -- only 49. I know you'd say
it was all meant to be: you went
from your husband's arms
to God's.

Christopher T. George

The ending lines of this poem came from what Barbara's husband Kent wrote to me in his e-mail of August 23 telling me of her passing:

"By Providence, I was privileged to have been home and holding her when she passed into eternity. Though she had weakened considerably in recent months, neither she nor I though that Friday was to be her last day. I had come home early from work to meet with her and a nurse about some other concern when she began a coughing spell. Holding her in my arms I would help her lean forward to cough and back to rest against a stack of pillows. At one point she paused, looked left to the nurse and asked 'Is this it?' The nurse replied 'It might be.' Barb turned back to me - nose to nose, her eyes dilated and she was gone."

Authors and Writing

Chris George at Sunday, August 7, Gazebo reading at LaGuardia Community Gardens, Greenwich Village. Photograph by Robert Schechter. Follow the link through the title for more on last Sunday's poetry reading and gathering.

I am going to use Bob's photograph of me on the flyleaf of my new book, which will be a bicentennial history of the St. Andrew's Society of Baltimore, tentatively titled Maryland's Scottish Heritage: The St. Andrew's Society of Baltimore, 1806–2006. I am meeting with Brian McNeill of the St. Andrew's Society this evening at the Thunder Grill in Union Station for a beer and some chile to discuss finalizing the book. Hopefully the book will be out in time for the Society's spring meeting in March.



I also have an article out in the September issue of Military History on "Militia Redeemed Before Baltimore" with a subcaption "After bungling their defense of Washington in August 1814, American militiamen showed their worth at North Point and Fort McHenry a month later."



One disappointment is that the planned September 16-18 performance of my musical "Jack--The Musical" written with composer Erik Sitbon has had to be cancelled. Nonetheless, I have War of 1812 talks planned for Fort McHenry's Star-Spangled Banner Weekend on the weekend of September 10-11 as well as a talk to give to a military group in Parkville on September 27. I should be able to sell more copies of Terror on the Chesapeake: The War of 1812 on the Bay and get more subscribers for The Journal of the War of 1812, and rope in more attendees for the Ninth National War of 1812 Symposium upcoming on October 8.

Gardeners and Poets

We gather in a Greenwich Village community garden,
beside the public apple tree and the private pear,
to recite our poems for friends and gardeners.

Seniors wander in and sit to listen for a while
then drift off like swallowtails to the honey-scented
buddleia. A woman in a straw sunhat harvests

plump tomatoes in a canvas shoulder bag. Magenta
hibiscus lolls by the gold of black-eyed susans;
our poet-comedian urges laughter with his routine

on spam to shrink his mortgage and grow his johnson;
curious couples peer through green chainlink;
as August evening breezes blow, pigeons convene

on a roof, and a male jitterbugs for bored females.
The rain holds off; words trail off in applause.
We poets retreat to a pub for Guinness and gin.

On the table, someone's placed a pink rose, a green apple.

Christopher T. George



Sciurine Chunter

I'm early to the site of the reading, to check
out the lie of the land. I admire the statue
of LaGuardia, walking mouth open, clapping.

The patio of Newgate pub sits empty, padlocked
where later we poets will regale and carouse,
the garden where we'll read locked too, guarded

by a squirrel in the apple tree. She regards
me with dark moist eye and squeals
her alarm call in insistent sciurine chunter.

Christopher T. George

Note: This was a reading my poets from the websites Gazebo and Able Muse. Pictures and other information from the reading can be reached by hitting the link through the title.