Leaving

My mother is dying.

Not right this minute.

Not today.

But the path is there,

winding up a hillside to who knows where.

She is in transition.

Turning grey green, like her eyes,

a leaf on a family tree.

A sepia photograph,

a smile beaming behind curls,

yearning to be recognised in a dusty album.

I don’t know that girl.

She was her, before I was me.

She danced and sang,

fired up with anger, stamped her foot,

on floorboards long demolished.

She spoke poetry on stage

and flushed pink with praise

flirted with boys,

some less desirable than others.

She heeded her papa’s advice, mostly.

She longed for her mother’s love

always – and it felt like catching a kite.

Bobby-socked she served white tennis

balls into the sunset.

She made a love-match.

She cooked and washed and coo-cooed babies

read storybooks, somehow wanting to

live in one of those castles.

But her man’s home was her castle,

perhaps in the wrong suburb.

She wrote a thousand birthday cards

All with xoxo

My mother is dying.

Not right this minute,

Not today.

No, not today,

xoxo