Your mama is a poem.
And I share your soiled shorts
this late into the game.
She is both sad and guilty;
one said to forgive her and you still,
deep into your thirties,
ask why you should care.
You do because your life is one
and your mom is a poem
and any other choice, though your emotions
support them, is incorrectly arranged, enervate
and hopeless; you do because you maintain lasting hope.
She lived her impieties and has suffered enough.
Your pain not inconsequential, but weaker
and less important than hers. Your brother was younger
at the time of transgression –
And that is your problem and it is not.
She left and is gone and she is not gone.
Embrace what you have over that which you do not,
I think: I’m merely rendering guesses, how fancy they are
and how serious your potential for disconsolency,
poor thing: your mama is a poem;
she’s the song of our modern times;
who knows what form of torment she has endured;
and where is your brother now? how is his child?
what are you going to do about it all once?
Nothing, you have said before;
everything hopefulness late at night
in darkness, alone, with the world about you.
Your special form of melancholy is not to you unique.
However, I am not calling for your dismissal of it:
your mother is your poem, your walking
breathing song; might interest you
or behoove your positive direction,
to sing with her some, once, while her time still
enmeshed with yours, her poem and yours, once.