Category: Empty Nest

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Daughter, Home

    Pandemic 2020

Oh I wish for the irrational—
to have her here always,
not two thousand miles away where
her life is after college.
My heart croons a little to hear
her laughter from two floors away, when
I see the dinner table set for three and not two,
the dishwasher loaded with extra bowls
and flatware; when I have to remember
to buy the 1% not the skim milk this time;
when she asks can I please fry up some eggs
over-easy because she says she can never get them
just right; even when I blow it and the yolk breaks
and spills its bright gold all over the pan, to hear her say:
Thanks Mom, that is just fine, this is so good.

—Andrea Potos
 

From Marrow of Summer (Kelsay Books, 2021). Reprinted with permission of the poet.

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Hurry

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store
and the gas station and the green market and
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,
as she runs along two or three steps behind me
her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?
To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?
Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,
Honey I’m sorry I keep saying Hurry—
you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking
back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,
hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

—Marie Howe

“Hurry”. Copyright © 2016 by Marie Howe, from THE KINGDOM OF ORDINARY TIME by Marie Howe. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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And My Love Goes With Him

in bursts of static song over a short-wave radio
in the coldest winter tucked into his blue wool socks

through the red, muddy water in the gutter after rain
in the cornerstone of the ground floor of his dormitory

woven into the wonderful purple of a southern twilight
and the strutting peacock of a clear mid-afternoon sky

up a steep ladder, down a steep hill: wherever he draws
breath: the oxygen, the carbon, the nitrogen, the pine

—Donna Vorreyer, from A House of Many Windows

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Question in the Face of Devotion

She has her sights set on India
her face holds a goddess glow when she shows me
the project on a cartoon colored map.

Her green eyes shock me deep into my green heart
she is a whisper in a silk sari
rose-gold bracelets sing on her brown wrists.

Will she disrobe in Goa
swim in the Arabian Sea
make a string bikini offering
leave her hammer on the shore?

She left her running shoes on my doorstep
I hold them like a cat’s trophy, see the shape of her
toe in the leather, feel the bending of her soul.

—Vicki Vener Iorio, from Poems from the Dirty Couch

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Window

Outside, the Maple seeds turn as they fall,
turn in complex spirals from their branches.
Sleep, baby, as I rock, as the Maple sways
in the gusts of air, shaking loose its twirling birds.

I have been you, wrapped warm near a forgotten pane,
seasons rushing, now it seems, through dresses, shoes,
cap and veil, the leaves rolling behind my eyes,
over Fall lawns, then buried under flawless snows.

What shapes and sound conspire to bring you dreams,
before you discover the scattering force of the world.
There will be a morning when you rise and find a road away
from me, my love left pressed like Maple leaves in a book.

Years will pass in pages I write to keep you
in my heart; the years will turn in orbits near and far.

For now, by this window, I hold you, your touch
like the small fingers of the rain—beyond us,
the leaves, and the indifferent arms of the wind.

—Richard Maxson