Our mother passed away in 2019, so I won’t be able to call her for Mother’s Day this year or any other year. It’s natural, though; people don’t live forever, and as an old Zen parable has it, happiness is dying before your children do. So, as my mom would say, it’s kosher. Actually, she didn’t really speak like that outside of some of the poems I’ve written in which she has morphed into a second version of herself, perhaps even a third or fourth. She was a Gemini, and liked to boast of having a split personality. She said if you looked at the left side of her face, you saw one person; the right side, another. Or maybe she saw Sybil when she was young, and liked the idea of having multiple personalities. I’ll never know.

But as such, she is now ‘my mother’, a recurring character in my poems. My first book was largely about her, and she keeps visiting me in the guise of a poetic muse. Below are some of the poems she’s inspired, which may be the only way of getting to know her at this point – or keeping in touch, in my case. Happy Mother’s Day, mom!

N.B. longer poems are posted as links.

Requiem for an Ocean Burial at Palette Poetry

Her Vanity at Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge

Resist.