Raina here. I thought I'd be cool like Ross (yes, I know...) and post a poem of mine that appears in my chapbook,
A Mother Is...available from
Lulu.com and
Amazon.com.
Maternal images come up a lot in my poems, mainly because I lost my mother in 2004 to breast cancer. I commemorate my past in these sorts of works. I'm really proud of this poem.
Enjoy!
Elegy
What it must be like to make last arrangements,
to say I want that cherry wood casket with gold latches,
hand-rubbed for maximum shine, elegant even in its use.
I know it is really pressed wood and will rot quickly.
By then, you will have forgotten about me, buried near my mother,
the second gravestone from the edge of a walkway,
near a highway overpass, though I can’t remember if it’s 309 or 73.
I wish I had a choice, to say where I wanted her
and how, now, I would change those minute details,
that aren’t so minute to me: the Catholic cemetery
that wouldn’t allow the grave marker with her picture,
and the awkward plot on a hill that the church paid for
because the insurance money hadn’t come in yet that makes me question
Do people step over her, as if she wasn’t there?
I wish that she could have a headstone
in some untraditional shape like a heart or an elephant, instead
of the flat marble marker with the prayerful hands grasping a rosary,
something with a profound epitaph like here lies one
whose name was writ in water.
Walking, the names come so easily,
the O’Connor’s, the Rossi’s, the Schmidt’s
and I remember that she was near a construction site
that vanished sometime ago, and a noisy overpass.
I am too ashamed to cry, to say the things I want to say,
so I busy myself with the trash surrounding the site,
and I pull up the grass that blocks her name,
spit onto a tissue to wipe away the thin layer of dirt
etched in the marble cracks of her name.
Today, I am on the Greyhound in Wilmington,
which is normally dreary and I think about death and
rain and the woman next to me who is too big for her seat
and falling asleep on my shoulder and how sadly intimate it makes me feel,
her arm on mine, snoring a bit, and I wonder how
it would feel to have a mother again, to feel whole.
And then, I wish she would stop rubbing against me
because I don’t know her like that.
No matter how much she tries to move away, she is still there, like memory.
