Painting by Casper David Friedrich
Hey
The stark simplicity of her flat
headstone greeted me in the soft
mist of a gray-green morning
not long ago, and a soft murmur
on the warm breeze chided me
for the years that have slipped by,
just a pinwheel’s whirl
of the cogs since my last visit.
“Hello, Mother,” I muttered,
knowing that the Stygian slab
at my wet feet was naught
but symbol, that the buried
red ceramic urn laden with
her carbonic ash held nothing
of She who had been maternal
essence to me for those too
brief thirty-nine years that
she strode erect in flesh.
I have never said farewell to her
because she barely left my dreams,
and her spiritual embraces still
leave dampness on my slumbering
cheeks, as she kisses her boy
good night.
Glenn Buttkus September 2010
4 comments:
There's nothing quite so sad as losing her at such a young age, except for the tragedy of losing her when she's still living, like I have.
Re your comment, Kirk Douglas looked amazingly like van Gogh in Lust for Life. I think it's actually a pretty good movie for the time period. I'll have to add a few of these others to my Netflix queue. Thanks for this illustrious list. Martin Scorsese played van Gogh? No way!!
(my Facebook badge is posted on my sidebar, btw)
I am afraid to tell you this, but unfortunately you are sane. Lovely poem and real. However thge tombstone and urn do prompt thoughts and messages you can verbalise and if you wish, pretend are being recieved elswhere than in your own mind!
PS. Thanks for the recommendation!
his is very touching, Glenn-- I'm so sorry you lost your mother when she was so young.
xox
A
Glen: 'Hey' - I found this very moving, and some lovely, and appropriate, words placed at the line ends too so the reader can linger on them: soft, murmur, buried, maternal... in fact, and I've just noticed this, if you read down the last words of every line there's a kind of sense that connects to what the poem as a whole is doing: e.g. flat soft morning... and later on 'buried with nothing' and 'maternal too that flesh', and, the one I love 'her dreams still slumbering'. How cool is that?
Lynne
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