Two Poems for My Mother

My Mother’s Thirtieth Anniversary

Yahrtseyt  August 1969-1999

Now thirty years since she phoned to say

I’m off to outer space.  It was the time

Of moon-walks, dust-trails on the surface, gray

Images of artificial flags, a rhyme

To simulate grand rhetoric when earth

Communicates with inner planets.  She died

Inside a coma, didn’t know her second birth,

The stroke of deeper humiliation.  We lied

To one another yet again, those days

Of her disappearance, as though the gleam

Of Irony could pierce the infinite darkness, like rays

Of multi-billion year explosions: not the lovely dream

Or hope, nor simple self-delusion.  She tried

To speak an awful truth I could not see, and sighed.

Supplement: August 2013

Another fourteen years have passed, and I can see

How young she was at fifty, so many dreams

Shattered like mirrors from the mocking sky,

And what she raged against—yes all those screams

Were justified against the uncomprehending world.

Now who remembers her? Who recognizes

The young woman in the photographs now curled

And darkened into faded sallow smudges?

The universe advanced in its never-

Ending flight from the first implosion;

The journey of its primal sparks over

Energy and negativity and on

Still boundless creation continues--  

But she was powerless to understand its clues.