Come Back No More

It's a different me now, no

rest from alterations more and more 

increasing – not at all by my will,

nor yet against it. This is the journey, the

way that we all grow, more wild

than we know, tossed by an invisible wind

which we ignore, imagining that

it's we who tilt the glass for the sand that passes.

The first young grasses can't return,

fine and fresh; they are long fronds now, no

way back to a before all gone, no more....
Blown onward unknowing, nevermore we return.

Written for the "No More" Sunday Mini-Challenge at 'imaginary garden with real toads'. The form is the Golden Shovel, based on the closing lines of Watching the Needle Boats at San Sabba by James Joyce: 'No more will the wild wind that passes / Return, no more return'.

Late Mother

After Eliot

Here you are again, little Mother, whom I have let

past my barriers again. Just now I see us

that last time in your house. You wanted me to go

taking the image of you dressed up and looking pretty. Sadly, then

it is followed by a different view of you

months later in the nursing home, mewling and

haggard. Summoned from far, by my cousin, I

struggled to come to terms. At the last, when

you sat up and glared past me at that sight invisible to me – the

vision – then flopped back down, dead … at that point the evening

went suddenly quiet and still. Ah well. What is, is.

Since that axe of a moment, nearly twenty years have spread

my life and some other deaths around me. I keep out,

nearly always, the memories; our differences, our troubled love. Against

this day, though, my defences buckle. It's Mother's Day – the
day on which to remember. 'Yes, you look pretty,' I think at the sky.

White chrysanthemum by Satdeep Gill licensed under Creative Commons  
(A symbol of Mother's Day, which in Australia falls on the first Sunday in May)


De at dVerse recently invited us to try the Golden Shovel, in which a line of poetry provides end words for one's own lines. I've always been captivated by the two opening lines of Prufrock; here I've used both. However I didn't write a poem in time to link to the dVerse prompt. The combination of Mother's Day – in which I refrain from joining the facebook adulations – and Brendan's Mini-Challenge: Harrows and Hallows at 'imaginary garden with real toads' gave me my subject matter. I'm also linking the poem to Poets United's Poetry Pantry #301.