The Moment

Memories. We can't live in the past, of course, but memories can help to make the going easier in the present.

Today's poem is based on earliest memory.

I find it hard to believe that I'm going all the way back to the cradle in recalling my mother's words ... not the specific words, but the memory of the sounds, enhanced, perhaps, by the distance, the years since I heard them.

Or I may just be imagining it all, the product of my wanting to "hear" them.

When I was about two years old, I went to live with my grandparents, who reared me to adulthood. My contact with my mother, over those years, was, by various circumstances, limited to a certain degree.

It would be natural for me to have more memories of my grandparents than my mother. Still, there is that connection, that need to go back as far as I can to those earliest days.

It's a wistful poem, a semi-dream poem. And I found a certain healing in the writing of it, a certain comfort in reading it again. It was originally published in Capper's:

THE MOMENT

In the moment
between sleeping
and waking,
when morning light
drifts strangely
through the trees
and sounds seem
borne aloft
by distant voices,
my mother’s words
come curling back
like wood smoke
on a rainy night,
and I am comforted
by that memory.

© 2001

Today's word: wistful