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.

For Mother's Day 2013

I found on old piece in response to the Poets United prompt, but was too late to link it at the PU site. If anyone arrives here looking for it, it is called Remembrance.

Remembrance

For my mother

Tasmania was mine, mmm, I loved it.  The many colours, many landscapes, the movement of the seasons.  The deep blue mountains, the bright meandering streams.  Silver and golden streams, water and sunlight.  Sunlight streaming on my wide back lawn, which spread like a meadow.  Shimmering grass and shimmering sky.  Fresh springtime mornings, their frosts diminishing, becoming dew.  Summer full of bees, their peaceful hum.  Me on my own, mooning through summer days, meandering round my meadow, humming too.

Winter mists hiding the valleys, climbing the hills, almost veiling the mountains, draping my  familiar town in mystery, magic.  Then melting gradually, by midday gone, the gleaming town new-minted.

Murky rain, black mud; myself muffled in overcoat, cap and mittens.  Gumboots to mid-calf.  Squelch, squelch, I am the master of all this mud!  Hurrying home to the warm, the welcoming  mother.  Tomato soup beside the fire.  My clothes hugging me warm: soft socks and cosy jumper.  Hugging myself with my happy arms.

The taste of tomato soup and mushy brown bread.  The taste of comfort, home.  The flavour of a warm room, safe from the frosts and marauding storms. Summer tastes were fruit - gooseberries, raspberries, nectarines, damson plums...  The purplest of plums, dark purple, thick with juice.  Messy all over my cheeks, staining my hair, covering my  hands to the wrists.  My rich purple lips, my inky tongue.  Mum amazed, aghast at so much mess.  Oh miraculous messy damson plums!  Welcome back to my memory, dreamtime summer fruit.

My summer stretched to encompass all the autumn.  Mellow harvest moons, huge and golden, mimicked the sun.  The sky smiled, the cosmos smiled on me.

'Come home!' the island calls me now.  'You are my child.  Come home, come back, you are mine.'

Published in Secret Leopard. Paris, Alyscamps Press, 2005. (See sidebar.)

(A friend asked if she could read some of my prose poems online. So I thought I'd better post some. See also next post.)

And linking — just a little late! — to Poets United's Mothers' Day 2013 edition of Poets Pantry