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| (Tap the image to read the poem.) |
There are scraps of paper piled at the far right corner of my desk, bits of poems emerging. I've learned to write down "something" when the notion or metaphor or string of words comes tapping. The more important they are, the more quickly they seem to vanish if I don't write them down.
This poem, though, came via a different route. My mother died "too soon" at age 53, while I was pregnant with my second baby. I needed to grieve and mourn, but I was also afraid to cry too much or too hard -- I didn't want the baby to arrive early, from my own stress. So that was a hushed-down, tamped-down farewell from me, while my younger sister assigned to herself the tasks of steering our father into his own new life chapter.
In the years since, one of the frustrations (of course) has been the many questions I would have asked, if we'd had more time together as two generations of mothers. But I've also learned to question the notions I had about who my mother was. We don't show our adult selves in depth to our kids when they are too young to understand.
My mother, when she was 8 years old, experienced the death of her own mother, from breast cancer. I knew that. I didn't know until pretty recently that as a child, she'd been an outcast among her New England cousins -- Joanie, the girl whose mother died, and who was fat, too. And unskilled with other children.
Another thing I knew: that she resented being told she must touch the cold dead hand of her mother's corpse in the casket. She said it robbed her of other, warmer, memories of her mother.
What I didn't realize until this poem began "appearing on paper" was how close the timing of Mom's mother's death was to the mysterious loss in flight of Amelia Earhart. As I put them together, I began, strangely, to understand more about my mother.
Which, of course, also means I learned something about myself.
Much appreciation to New Feathers for including the poem in its newly released anthology.
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