Mother's Night
       

She's celebrating it for me. She's coming back
from the place where she was scattered, from the place
where she was introduced to medical students
and their teachers and was slowly taken apart,
back from where she lost herself among nurses,
from what was left of her house, from her single bed,
from her sink and her kitchen window where she could see
the dead stalks in her garden. She's coming back,
her arms full of the flowers I gave her once
a year in April, and she's asking me
to put them back on the stems in the greenhouses
they came from, to let them shrink away from the light.

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Copyright © 2012 David Wagoner All rights reserved
from After the Point of No Return
Copper Canyon Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission