When the Roses Bloom Again[1]

 
For years what I remembered
was her sad heart,
how her cancer made the sky gray with sickness.

I couldn’t say how she was born
in a valley sweet with orange blossoms.

I couldn’t retell her survival stories,
how she turned herself into a border
on the shore of cold water.

My therapist tells me I need to write her
a last letter,

that the beginning of recovery
is singing in the pain.

Earlier today while sitting at a stop light
Claire de Lune was on my car radio.

I let myself cry
and thought about the sound of her laughter,
when she sat at her old piano after midnight

playing without sheet music
in a housedress covered in flowers.

____

[1] this is the title of a song written by William D. Cobb in 1901

*

Memory as Night Stranger

 
Sometimes when I can’t forget
what I don’t want to remember—
when my bedroom window is a silver hue—

when sleep is almost as far away as sky,
I can almost hear the high pitch of a lost child

and I remember that even though my mother
could not hear what I could hear,
I would tell her early in the morning

that there was again that voice,
a plea for help, that again

it had come from just beyond the river
behind the backyard and she would again

tell her story of a black umbrella left outside
that the very young and drowsy
saw as an angry Jabberwocky.

She would say that sometimes
what looks like the darkest cloud in the growing night
is a flock of starlings about to take flight.

*

The Sky’s Vast Blue

 
A man and a woman
stand in front
of the ocean.

Their children run back
and forth
in the water.

The tide’s yin and yang.

A revelation—
I love you,
I don’t love you.

Eating scraps of bread,
a communion
of seagulls

forgives the man
and the woman.

Giving back seashells,
the children
forgive the shore.

***

(Featured image from Pexels)