Old Mother

1

In all creation made, is owed to our mother,

The world was ours to stage, owed by our mother,

The sea and beach we played, is owed to our mother,

And ancient memory we made, is a gift by our mother;

But I confess, I wrinkled in pain,

When in last breath, you exhaled his name,

And at your bed, I bathed

In your lifeless hands, for hours that day,

As your warm hands frosted, and your love and flesh was buried away

2

But when you lived, we lived too,

As hearts made off of you, we broke off from you,

And seperate from you we spent our days,

Grew into adults, our draining age,

Full our schedule with wearisome days,

We hadn’t time, yesterday,

No time, till today, to say we loved you mother

I’m sorry, and brother says so too in his own way

3

I’m haunted mother, I beg you mother, can you forgive your sons

Who left you to loneliness, and felt unwelcome

To tend to time and must rewind

Your gears that rattle and spin at us you remind

While ignorant of us, on days when we were free we chugged

Away at barrels of liquor and glass of beer, at nearby hub

Those days, I yearned, at loss of fun, your gentleness

When hard at the lay, to earn less to live in wages;

I thought your humble face in mind, in my tragedies

I thought your smiling embrace, and welcome pleasantries;

And those days I thought, however old mother is—still—

—Still, I loved her

4

This brother mine with pride and dignity,

Is evermore in his grudge, unfortunately

Of the times he was chastised and felt you belittled unfairly,

And left home bitter yet begrudgingly,

He was always immature, and proud to a fault,

He was much too prideful to say it was his fault,

That you were all alone with a weight added to your heart,

A child of yours left home, and you felt it was your fault;

And your mind was unsettled for some time, collecting dust in the dark;

He was stubborn with a scowl, at your wilted hour

But as the grave promptly was made, your prideful son sobbed ashamed,

As if you had told him your last goodbye, from beyond the golden gate,

My brother coarse and hard,

Let loose the pain, and love he gained of sweeter memories of you

As he broke and finally spoke:

I loved you mother, I should have told,

Now I’ll be as the beggars be, scrounging the depths of my soul for hope

5

His cry startled the clouds up high,

And the clouds sprinkled teary eyed,

At lost tears my brother held when his eyes narrowed, cold and dried,

Now he begs upon the earth kneeling to

The mother he lost, but never knew,

And gulped his frigid adolescence, at that age a strange brew,

Seasoned with the remorseful rain, atop the grave,

Of the mother he never knew;

And once the coffin descended, all siblings and weather and linnet flew,

And I left to watch my wallowing brother over her tomb,

Of the mother he wished he knew

6

Had we had stayed, more morose we’d be,

To our binding fates on the path of society,

Days of stern face, and lost time,

As I dreary over the lost mother of mine,

My brother surely would lose sleep, his pillow filled to brim of waters weeped,

So we passed the long fences of tombstone,

And forward along dirt paths, and return to our old mother’s home