Memory, in Marianne Baskin's "In Rememberance," behaves less like a monument than like weather: it scatters, it rains, and then, unexpectedly, it blossoms. The poem moves from loss to renewal in a few dozen words. Its central idea is that remembering is not just mourning what has gone but an act that keeps producing something new.
The opening image sets the terms. "Time's wings / have turned / into / scattered feathers." Winged time is an old, familiar picture of how quickly life passes, but Baskin breaks it up. A wing suggests flight and purpose, while scattered feathers suggest something that has come apart and drifted down. The line breaks make the same point. "Into" sits alone on its own line, so the reader feels the transformation as a small drop.
The next lines list what has been lost: "letters / forgotten / unwritten." The words are stacked like things left behind. "Unwritten" matters most, because it suggests not only lost correspondence but words that never existed at all. Then the scene turns to the weather: "the grass / now green / with rain / drops this / year's / flowers / against the / window." The syntax is deliberately slippery. "Rain drops" can be read as raindrops, or as rain that *drops* flowers against the glass. The line break after "this" makes the reader hold the phrase "this year's" in suspense. The effect is a blur of seeing through a wet window, where the garden and the glass overlap.
The strangest moment is "window.sight," where a full stop sits inside a fused word. It may be a typographical quirk, but it works as a hinge. "Window" belongs to the outer world, "sight" to the inner one, and the dot between them is where looking turns into seeing. What follows is about perception: "changed eyes / scatter visions." The verb "scatter" echoes "scattered feathers," so the outer debris has become an inner habit of mind. Then comes "sugar plums have / danced." The phrase echoes the well-known Christmas line about visions of sugar plums dancing, and the echo seems deliberate, given the word "visions" just before it. The tense matters, though. "Have danced" is completed and finished, so the childlike wonder the phrase carries belongs to the past. The speaker remembers it from the far side of change.
Then the poem turns. "Each / feather lands / and / grows / words / blossom / to this / year's / eyes." The single-word lines slow the reading to the pace of something drifting down. A feather is also a quill, and that links the opening image to the "letters / unwritten" earlier on. What fell apart as time's wings is landing as writing tools, and then as plants. The feather *grows*, and the words *blossom*, so the poem's flower imagery, first seen rained against the window, now describes language itself. The reader can also take "grows" as ending its line and then as leading into "words," so the feather might grow words. The ambiguity suits a poem about things changing form.
The poem has no rhyme and no steady meter. Its rhythm comes from fragmentation, with lines of one to three words and few punctuation marks until the final full stop after "eyes." That absence of punctuation lets phrases slide into each other, so the sense keeps shifting as the next line arrives. There is sound patterning in place of rhyme: the long vowels in "green," "rain," "sight" and "eyes" give the middle of the poem a soft, drawn-out feel. The repeated "this year's" frames the poem too. It appears first with flowers and last with eyes, so the poem begins and ends in a present that has been made new.
Even the spelling of the title, "Rememberance," keeps the whole word "remember" visible inside it. That may be accidental, but it fits a poem about memory as something actively kept up.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it claims. It does not argue that loss is redeemed. It shows a pile of feathers and lets them become words. The word "scattered" begins as damage and ends as sowing. For a reader, that offers a small, believable consolation: what time breaks up can still be picked up and used for writing, and the seeing that does it belongs to "this year's eyes."