Mother's Day

A poem after witnessing grief

On Mother’s Day afternoon, driving by a small church cemetery, I noticed a man near a gravesite and wondered what it was all about.

MOTHER’S DAY

He brought his folding chair to the graveyard,

whispering to his dead mother at her headstone,

buried there years before when he was a young man.

If she can hear him, be it in heaven or hell,

she has certainly forgiven him for what had been,

for what is now, or what will never be.

All that time wasted and tears unspoken,

and the love that was there despite it all,

rises through the hardened ground.

And as the sun falls and the prayers have been said,

he will gather his chair and carry it away until

another Mother’s Day.

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Photo: Taryn Elliott