“we sing into the shadows of too much sorrow”
A Review of Waiting for the Mercy Ship by Lois Roma-Deeley (Broadstone Books, 2025)
by Brandon James O’Neil
65 pp., paperback, $22.50
February 15, 2025
Broadstone Books
ISBN: 978-1-956782-93-6
Our local bookstore’s poetry selection is small, consisting mostly of those standard works readers are sure to ask for. I’ve come to know the contents of this section well, and to note with each visit the books that come and go. Among the guaranteed sellers—Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Paublo Neruda—is Dante.
But not the full Divine Comedy. No, a single volume edition with all three parts has gone untouched as long as I’ve been popping into the bookshop. Rather, Inferno, as a stand-alone work, in whatever translation, seems to sell as soon as it goes on the shelf—or at least between my frequent visits. Powerful, even tender, moments do punctuate Inferno, but its appeal for the everyday reader seems to be its distinctive mixture of schadenfreude and the grotesque. Especially as the poet descends into hell’s lower circles reserved for the undeniably contemptible, readers revel in seeing the “baddies” getting an eternity of what’s coming to them.
Inferno, however, denies us a defining human characteristic, captured best by the familiar Serenity Prayer. We are able, amazingly, to “accept the things I cannot change” and to grow in “courage to change the things I can.” For those in the inferno, a short lifetime of not knowing the difference leads to an eternity of repetitive torments. “In the language of modern psychology,” argues W. S. Merwin, “Inferno portrays the locked, unalterable ego, form after form of it, the self and its despair forever inseparable.” But where is there such a statis in the human spirit? We adapt to our environment or we adapt the environment to us. Life is not inferno. Life is purgatorio, where, as Merwin translates it, “the human spirit is made clean and becomes worthy to ascend to heaven.” Purgatorio affirms that, to quote a bumper sticker, it’s all about the journey, not the destination.
Lois Roma-Deeley’s Waiting for the Mercy Ship documents the poet’s own purgatorial journey, which like Dante’s, coincides with personal loss and is urged forward by great love. Roma-Deeley is a grieving grandmother, whose grandson, tenderly referred to throughout her text as Sweet Boy, is heartbreakingly absent. He leaves behind a room full of mementos: “A tattered box of magic tricks. / The catcher’s mitt tossed in the corner. . . Dozens of journals. Ink-filled notebooks. / That leather jacket thrown across the bed / as if he’d only just left the room.” Threaded throughout Section One are letters addressed to Sweet Boy during his long stay at a distant treatment center. “I know you are 18 now but I feel like these letters are a pin hole in time . . . a place where my heart reaches yours.” She tries to cheer him up with funny anecdotes and family legends; she encourages him to keep a journal, promising that “writing helps to sort it all out.” The poem cycle into which the letters appear speaks of absence and memory—of trying to hold with the mind what is already slipping away—revealing vulnerability, even foreboding, beneath the letters’ persona of matriarch and storyteller. “I tied a red ribbon to the screen door / hoping the Angel of Death will forget about us. / I don’t know what else to do to keep you safe.”
The poems in Waiting for the Mercy Ship also document an unprecedented time of shared vulnerability. In her role as Poet Laureate of Scottsdale, Arizona, Roma-Deeley delivered a slightly different version of her poem, “If Wisdom Could Be Dug out of the Desert Earth,” at the State of the City 2022. Scottsdale was still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, and as mayor David D. Ortega reminded those watching the remote session, “Every one of us has felt the painful and at times tragic consequences of the pandemic. Quite frankly,” he added, “we're all past ready to be done with it.”
Roma-Deeley’s poem that night urged us not to rush past difficult feelings, even while the city was starting to lift its restrictions. “This pandemic age, bright and cold, / rises as a full moon over McDowell Mountain. / as we sing into the shadows of too much sorrow. . . . My friend” – now speaking directly to her fellow citizen – “make whatever sense you will of this hated time. . .” When edited for inclusion in Waiting for the Mercy Ship, the poem now addresses Roma-Deeley’s Sweet Boy, “this hated time” becomes “this painful time,” and “this pandemic age” becomes “this day.” Ancient petroglyphs that implored Scottsdaleans to “never give up on each other” now cry “Mercy. Have Mercy.” These two versions of the poem demonstrate Roma-Deeley’s masterful correlation of individual loss and shared loss, her gift for communicating complex feelings in language of the brilliant commonplace.
Loss provides few answers, and powerful, ultimately unanswerable questions charge the first section of Waiting for the Mercy Ship: “If healing has a starting point, when does it begin?” “What am I trying to say when nothing can be said?” “Will love save you?” Comfortability asks no questions; things will always be the same. Grief undermines this assumption, and launches the poet into a landscape saturated with query. In the air above, a helicopter “cuts through a questioning sky,” while in caverns below, she questions God’s work of hidden stalactites: “Why create such elegance in the dark?” Roma-Deeley achieves what she calls a “questioning belief,” a faith nurtured by the tension of “days when I am certain and days when I am not,” a belief in which uncertainty is a virtue. In another poem, the tension is poised between “Okay. Not Okay.” Questioning indicates a hope of discovery, though answers may not come in this lifetime. The journey is a series of questions with only partial revelations. “Above your head,” says the titular poem, “thunderclouds rumble / like unanswered prayers of the faithful.”
Grief’s landscape and all that moves within it, for Roma-Deeley, is upward facing. The first lines of the prefatory poem, “For All the Little Lost,” invite those “staring into the blue fluorescent lights swinging overhead at the Wal-Mart store” to seek out and console “the boy standing under a street light looking up at his stolen shoes.” Elsewhere, Sweet Boy looks up toward a “startled Scrub Jay” peering back “with a sharp turn of its neck.” The poems direct the reader’s eye toward owls and hawks, toward the horizon, the sun, moon, and stars. In another poem, the poet asks for a dream of Sweet Boy “walking along the bluffs high above Crystal Cove,” while from below, “I’ll be looking up at you.” Our human “open palms upturned toward heaven and muted cries” are later mirrored by “giant Saguaros [that] lift their hallelujah arms and creosote bushes [that] weep sweetly.” This constant looking up reminds us that Dante’s purgatory is a mountain to climb. “I directed my vision to the hill that climbs highest.” Dante and Virgil keep their eyes turned toward skyward, as they traverse “a rise so that someone who has no wings can go up.”
Your eyes cannot help but look up in Arizona; the sky’s colors are a constant wonder, and so it is natural that Roma-Deeley directs readers to look up into a dramatically vivid sky. We see there at sunset “a blue ridge, a dimming thread of gold,” and in the evening “a full moon rising over the mountain ridge bathing sky, valley, road, in electric blue light.” The Arizona sky’s blueness becomes purgatorial, recalling Dante’s “oriental sapphire” that spans “the serene countenance of the clear sky.” Get out from under Wal-Mart’s “blue fluorescent lights” that wash out the play of light and dark, Roma-Deeley implores, and consider instead the wild hawk, who “flies over city lights.”
But Roma-Deeley’s sky will not always be the serene blue of Dante. The eventual loss of Sweet Boy occurs in the unwritten space between Sections One and Two, with the latter opening “After the Funeral,” a day in which “The sky turns a sickly green,” and “tricks of light from an approaching storm” coincide with visions of “the shadow of you.” Green, a secondary color mixture of blue and yellow, parallels the compounded feelings of loss.
Roma-Deeley lifts readers’ perceptions beyond earth’s atmosphere. “Listen and wait. / Quasars are singing / through the black holes of space.” On his own cleansing journey, Dante “saw the stars larger than was usual, and brighter,” and having reached the summit of Mount Purgatory, ready to enter paradise, he found himself “remade . . . pure and ready to ascend to the stars.” Of her lost Sweet Boy, Roma-Deeley writes that “The stars in the sky still shine his name from lists of the lost and almost forgotten.” Far-off space invites us into conversation with far-off loved ones, since, Roma-Deeley suggests, “[t]he voices of those who came before / live among the stars.” Ours is a cosmos of presence, contacting us in our loneliness:
Under an ever-expanding dome of stars,
made from dust and dreams,
there is an astonishing relief
you’ll inhale
with the constellations’ deliberate movements--
this is always the unexpected wonder--the long-lost light
reaching for you
sitting in the dry grass, underneath a mesquite tree--
come, it said,
let me take you home.
Waiting for the Mercy Ship traverses the landscape of grief, and fearlessly documents the processing of sorrow that refuses to leave us where it found us. Though Roma-Deeley laments that her heart has become “a broken compass in a wilderness of despair,” love—its lessons, complexities, and wounds—is the lodestone throughout her poems, just as voices of loved ones are the navigable stars. In this purgatorial human experience, in which we learn acceptance and the courage to change, we receive neither static blessings nor stationary afflictions. In her letters to Sweet Boy, Roma-Deeley admires her parents, whose “imperfect lives were filled with hope and renewal,” who “loved deeply and strived mightily.” Hope, then, is the difference between Inferno and Purgatorio.
Brandon James O’Neil is reviews editor of Vita Poetica.
