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Yartzeit |
My mother taught me how to dream.
Together we would page through albums
brown with age, where stern-faced strangers
sat stiffly in their tall-backed chairs.
The women wore the burdens
in their faces. The men
in their slumped shoulders.
In the background, a gaunt cow
leaned against the fence.
Silver birches shivered in the snow.
Driven by hunger and their neighbors’
hatred, they fled familiarity
embracing risk.
A century and a half a world away,
we would walk the avenue
stopping to buy a multi-colored ice
suspended in its paper cone,
a loaf of rye bread, book of stamps,
and time would slow. Our shadows
stretched behind us,
the past we’d never shake.
Last stop, the library
where I knew every book.
Leather spines embossed with gold
would arch to meet my hand,
to welcome me.
These printed pages were my mode.
I made a world within
this world and slipped away.
The pages rustled with the sound
of leaves in wind. A full moon
silvered the walls
in slivers as though someone
had sliced it with a knife until
the sky would empty, fill again,
and all the time I sat, enchanted.
While I was elsewhere
shadows pooled under the oaks.
Where have they gone
the neighbor with his little dog?
Red rosebush in the yard?
The A&P?
In my memory, my mother smiles,
her dark curls bound by a kerchief.
A gold ring glows on her finger
the ring I left, forgotten, on her hand.
How heavy that urn, those ashes
bearing all the weight
of generations.
copyright 2014
Robbi
Nester |
