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The week after you died, Mom,
you were in my checkout line,
little old lady who met my stare
with the fear, the yearning
of a mortal chosen by a god,
feeling herself change
painfully cell by cell
into a shadow, a laurel, you, a constellation.
Copyright © 2013 by James Richardson. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on May 28, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
Consider the palms.
So much on the verge
of flame.
In a hot
wind anything
is tinder: paper, sage
feverish with bees,
your auburn
hair, my hand
that glows with a thought.
Sunset
or sleepless dawn,
nothing is sure
but what’s already burned—
water that’s ash, steel
that has flowed and cooled,
though in the core
of a star, they too
would fuse and rage,
and even volcanic
glass and char,
and the cold seas,
and even
what we once were
might burn again—
or in the heart.