A memorial is usually something solid, like a stone or a plaque. J.J. Loe's "Memorial" is made of roots, fruit, wind and half-sleep. The title promises remembrance of someone absent, and the poem suggests, without saying so, that the person is gone. Everything that follows is about how an absence can keep returning in living, changeable forms.
The poem moves through three zones. It begins underground, where "the roots of the trees find you" and "bring you again to the sunlight." The verbs are active and almost tender. The roots search, find and carry upward. The poem then rises into the sky, above "the old family home," where "the wind draws you / amongst the moving clouds." Finally it drops into a bedroom, with the speaker "awakening now with the memory." The journey from earth to air to the intimate space of a bed mirrors how grief works. It starts as something vast and elemental, then narrows to one small, unbearable detail.
The fruit imagery is the richest part. The speaker asks, "What strange fruit / bares such strains of sweetness / I may press of you?" "Strains" is a lovely double word. It can mean musical phrases, varieties of fruit, or the effort of pressing. The sweetness is therefore part melody, part harvest, part labour. "Press" also does several jobs. It suggests squeezing juice, flattening a flower in a book to keep it, and holding someone close. The spelling "bares" rather than "bears" may be deliberate. Either way, it adds the idea of uncovering to the idea of producing, as if the tree is exposing something private. For some readers "strange fruit" carries a much darker echo, but here the phrase is bent toward sweetness, and the strangeness lies in finding anything sweet in loss.
Later the fruit is "ripened" and "laying open / their enduring seeds." This is the poem's quiet consolation. A split fruit looks like a ruin, but the seeds inside are what continues. Nothing is said outright about death or consolation. The image does the work.
The form supports this soft, gradual feeling. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are short and often end on unstressed, open words such as "you," "clouds" and "air," so the poem drifts rather than marches. The slashes are the most unusual feature. In "find you /", "clouds /" and "softly / whispering" they work like breaths or hesitations, small breaks where the thought slips and recovers. They also visually cut the line, which fits a poem about something broken that is nevertheless trying to join up again. Stanzas thin out as the poem proceeds. The line "the tangled idea" stands entirely alone, and the final stanza is a single trailing line.
That ending repays close attention. "Your vision coalesces / from the rudiments of my slumber." "Coalesces" suggests a shape forming out of mist, and "rudiments" suggests raw beginnings, like the first unformed growth of a seedling. Memory is not recalled whole but assembled out of fragments in the "half-light morning air," a halfway time that suits a presence which is neither fully there nor fully lost. Then comes the surprise: what forms is not a face or a voice but "the tangled idea / of your hair upon the pillow." The word "tangled" quietly links back to the roots, so the buried web beneath the ground and the dishevelled hair on the pillow become the same image. Notice too that it is only the *idea* of the hair, not the hair itself. The poem is honest that what the speaker gets is a trace, and judging by this last image, a very intimate one.
What makes "Memorial" worth reading is how it refuses the usual shape of an elegy. It does not praise the dead person or list qualities or announce a lesson. Instead, it lets the natural cycle of roots, sun and seeds stand in for consolation, then undercuts that grand scale with a domestic detail small enough to hurt. The memorial here is not built. It grows, it blows about, and it appears each morning at the edge of waking.