Lost Brother by Stanley Moss

Stanley Moss was born June 21, 1925 in Woodhaven, New York. Moss attended Trinity College and Yale University. He founded the Sheep Meadow Press in 1977. Moss taught English in Barcelona and Rome; he is a private art dealer who specializes in Spanish and Italian Old Masters.

Lost Brother

I knew that tree was my lost brother
when I heard he was cut down
at four thousand eight hundred sixty-two years;
I know we had the same mother.
His death pained me. I made up a story.
I realized, when I saw his photograph,
he was an evergreen, a bristlecone like me,
who had lived from an early age
with a certain amount of dieback,
at impossible locations, at elevations
over ten thousand feet in extreme weather.
His company: other conifers,
the rosy finch, the rock wren, the raven and clouds,
blue and silver insects that fed mostly off each other.
Some years bighorn sheep visited in summer—
he was entertained by red bats, black-tailed jackrabbits,
horned lizards, the creatures old and young he sheltered.
Beside him in the shade, pink mountain pennyroyal—
to his south, white angelica.
I am prepared to live as long as he did
(it would please our mother),
live with clouds and those I love
suffering with God.
Sooner or later, some bag of wind will cut me down.

—Stanley Moss
The overall impression I received from this poem was that everyone (even trees) has a role model to look up to. A person could focus his or her whole life trying to live up to the memory and expectations of another. Although people should try to be their own person because no two people are alike. I feel the idea of striving to be someone else is an internal struggle that all people deal with at one point in their lives. The ones who overcome the struggle and become their own person have sturdier roots (less likely to be knocked down by the wind).

There are two lines in the poem they made a deep impression on me personally. "His death pained me. I made up a story." Death is a painful topic that is avoided at dinner time conversations; people deal with death in many different ways. In my life, I have death with the death of my father and brother, but this poem relates more to my brother. At the age of 2, I traveled to the hospital with my father because my mom was in labor with my first sibling. Since she had the flu, the birth was hard and the baby did not survive. I was young and never not got to know my brother, but that does not mean his death was any less painful than my father's six years later. As a family, we planted a tree in the backyard in his memory. Sometimes I dream what it would be like if Nikodemus was still alive? Would his nickname be Nick, would he share a room with my other brother, would he like to swim as much as I do, would he share my passion for books, or would he be the sibling I would always go to in times of happiness and trouble? I will never know. But, some nights I lay in my room imagining what he would look and act like. "I make up a story." Lucky for me, my family was blessed with three more children, so I have two sisters (Kadia and Abbey) and a brother (Cleveland) that I can play with, annoy, or talk to. I am happy for the life I have, but every now and then I wonder how it could be different.