Gayle E. Pierce

02 . 20 . 47 - 02 . 05 . 20

Celebrate Gayle

This space is dedicated to honoring the memories and celebrating the life of Gayle. We invite you to share your thoughts, stories, messages of love, and remembrance. Your words will help preserve her legacy and bring comfort to others visiting this memorial site.

In Memoriam, Mother
By Bis Pierce

In life, mother, our absence from you
Had been in our respective distance:
You ensconced in your Arcadian home
By the banks of Chena happily sustained,
And we across the way near the shores
Of the Pacific with our milk and honey,
Or, otherwise, separated by cities,
Careers, and youthful captivities.

Time precipitated this absence, subdividing
Our inheritance by chance placement,
For in our stagger starts, began your birth
And our eventual entry, neither known—
While fortune like weather further wend,
Hastening the dividing outbound trend.

So, too, in death: we’re here, and you’re there,
Walled up and breached vainly
By longing and long swells of your memory.

Thus, in life and death, we’re just as near,
Interspaced, though, by earth and air,
Light and dark, but in differing measures.
In all direction, this varying distance,
And in that, our joint relative absence.

You live on, mother, as if you remain
Home and we here thriving amain
Until we join you again as if sent
As orphan boys were once from the Orient.