Leaving
By Michèle Nardelli
My mother is dying.
Not right this minute.
Not today.
But the path is there,
winding up a hillside to who knows where.
She is in transition.
Turning grey green, like her eyes,
a leaf on a family tree.
A sepia photograph,
a smile beaming behind curls,
yearning to be recognised in a dusty album.
I don’t know that girl.
She was her, before I was me.
She danced and sang,
fired up with anger, stamped her foot,
on floorboards long demolished.
She spoke poetry on stage
and flushed pink with praise
flirted with boys,
some less desirable than others.
She heeded her papa’s advice, mostly.
She longed for her mother’s love
always – and it felt like catching a kite.
Bobby-socked she served white tennis
balls into the sunset.
She made a love-match.
She cooked and washed and coo-cooed babies
read storybooks, somehow wanting to
live in one of those castles.
But her man’s home was her castle,
perhaps in the wrong suburb.
She wrote a thousand birthday cards
All with xoxo
My mother is dying.
Not right this minute,
Not today.
No, not today,
xoxo
About the Creator
Michèle Nardelli
I write...I suppose, because I always have. Once a journalist, then a PR writer, for the first time I am dabbling in the creative. Now at semi-retirement I am still deciding what might be next.
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