Mother's Day

In honour of Mother's Day, I'm reposting an earlier poem.
I was very fortunate to have such a good mother and miss her still. It was my mother who taught me my first love for both reading and creative writing. I was a July baby and my mother taught first grade. As Spring arrived, I began to struggle and kick throughout the day. Mother told me, however, that every time she set her class down for story hour, as soon as she said 'Once upon a time..' I became quiet.

That along, would be a neat memory, but it goes further. I had colic as an infant and mother was often up in the night, patting my back, rocking me, trying to comfort me. One night, she said 'Once upon a time...' on an impulse, and told me a story. I stopped crying. After that, each night until the colic was gone, that's how she settled my tears.

Now that, I think is a really neat memory....Pris

Lilies And Headstones

Mother climbs from her grave nightly,
the moon sliding, bone white, along that
fragile passage from day's end to beginning.
She re-arranges plastic flowers, talks
to other coffin-freed friends, polishes
the naked cross guarding the faithful dead.

Lilies once bordered the shrubs
surrounding our house like a moat.
White ones. Yellow ones. Striated ones.
Soft scented sentinels poking their heads
up through the warm soil each Spring.
My mother's pride.

Fake carnations grace her headstone now.
Stiff, like the bodies lined in neat rows
beneath her; cold like her own body
which will never again climb into a warm bed
or scatter the crows that yet steal
from our abandoned cherry tree.

They suck the fruit cheerfully, despite
old clattering pans, and one rotten scarecrow
with eyes picked as empty as the spaces
where lilies once danced with the wind.



Pris Campbell
©2004


This poem took second in the December 2004 IBPC

Comments from the judge:

How could one not read the first line of this poem and not wantto read the next? Lilies and Headstones had me from the beginning, and took me places I never expected. The poem could’ve easily slipped into sentimentality, the poet telling us how they feel instead of showing us that marvelous scarecrow at the end, eyes picked empty. --David Hernandez