Looking
My mother is a young girl again standing at the edge of a field near The Milepost, ready to leave. Across the field invisibly, we stand together, together and each alone, waiting for her to see us, her son, her daughters, her husband. We raise our hands to catch her sight but she cannot see us, she is too young for us yet, she only sees the sky and the green fields beneath, the way young eyes do and she looks at the road leading away toward us and feels on her skin the clear breath of sunlight. She is made for the world in her own way, she is life about to make life, she is a youth about to blossom out of a particular tragedy into her own kind of triumph. She is herself but she is all of our past and all of our future too, she is looking and waiting as we wait, for everything to come true. -originally published in Everything is Waiting for You and collected in The Seven Streams: An Irish Cycle; available here
A good part of mourning my mother took the form of giving her away: of letting her go to have her own life again unmediated by how I had known her as a son. Mother may be one of the most difficult names of all to to shed, but it felt important in coming to terms with who my mother might have been to imagine her before any of us were in her life, looking into her future and guided once again, only by her own eyes. DW
It is beautiful and serendipitous energy that this poem appears on Substack on this day, June 14th. My mother, who passed in 2015, would have been 93 today. Her love of nature and art were divine blessing in how I now see the world.