210118 anniversary

jan 18

My mother never knew Rain, who was born the year she died. She never saw any of my Christmas gingerbread creations. 

This poem was written twenty-seven years ago. It was thirty years ago that my mother died. I can't believe I have been so long without her. After she died I discovered I was mourning two mothers: the one I had just lost, and the one I had lost twenty years earlier, when she was first diagnosed with brain tumours. The tumours took away so much as the years went by, she had difficulty walking and suffered headaches that curtailed her social life. She spent months in recovery and rehabilitation after each operation: the tumour kept growing back. I mourned the grandmother that my children should have known, instead of the one who needed quiet and couldn't join in their games. I mourned the mother to whom I could have gone when I needed someone to lean on.

*****

anniversary

so much in the past three years 

I have wanted to share with you

the smell of the hyacinth

the purple-blue one you liked better than the others

the baby, who's two

roland's death, and phil's

how i could have been nicer to you

the purse with the ladies painted on it

a poem i wrote

jane austen

pregnancy

the cabinet I found to keep your china in

tea-times

laughing

lighting this candle for you

i can't believe you are a closed book

all your pages written

and ended

stopped in time

i miss you

as if when you were alive

you were a frame

that the picture of my life hung in

and now it's fallen 

and broken into pieces

i hope that somewhere you can hear me

and not be hurting

i wanted 

to share these years with you

Mumma Yaga