moving day...

 

my mother's house was a beautiful home
warm, enchanting, full of laughter, wisdom
and pain as she bore eight welcome strangers
that she claimed as her daughters
over a bridge twenty years long, Mary to Lucy,
naked and screaming through wide open doors;
she was always tending garden
roses, lilacs and tulips grew around her
as birds sang in the trees that she had planted
and people were ever drawn to her edges
like lost bees to nectar; she was always
feeding someone from the ample larder
of wisdom and understanding in her attic
stored in boxes which never gathered dust;
she had so many stories about Brooklyn
and the cold-water flat where her two
blind parents raised she and her brothers
about her father and his musician friends
piling coats on top of children in their beds
on band-practice nights and of music
warm and beautiful, drifting into their bedrooms;
about trips to Coney Island and picking up shells
about how the sand and surf "spoke" to her;
My mother was always ironing and folding
sewing and mending, cooking and cleaning,
talking and laughing,  so that no one even
noticed that her basement had been flooding
beyond the hope of bailing, and on the day
in her sixty-third year, that the one and only
unwelcome stranger who ever entered her home
moved completely in, and she moved out,
the wind blew unceasingly clouds and sunshine
in furious succession like a movie reeling
dramatically fast forward to the solitary moment
when her house was left empty and it lay there
weeping like a baby where softly white sheets
had gently held her,  just a moment ago...

lucy meskill