My Mother’s Sky
(2024, Edge Unlimited Publishing; ISBN: 9798329439182; ASIN: B0D81NNRMJ; ISBN: 9798329462050)
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Tag Archives: My Mother’s Sky
My Mother’s Sky (part 34 of 34)
I am lifted
Blood on a field Blood in a cloud
and then so many
streams flowing, unassuming.
I take your hand, lean
over you and kiss your forehead,
weeping, praying, saying
again and again I love you, thank you.
Your breaths are short, coming from below
not from your chest, but from your deepest gut,
stillness, ease, a letting go.
I drop like a bird on your shoulder.
I know you are leaving. You know
it is a beautiful alchemy, accumulation
of a life so gloriously lived. I tell you
to take Jesus’ hand and he will take you
to the golden tender light of eternal heaven.
You take his hand, and God
has become the atmosphere,
encapsulating, removing time.
Your last breath is more
a soft sigh than a breath,
not a cross-wind of struggle,
not a brush-stroke of “But wait..”
You are gone.
Seagulls fill the view from the window,
circling, joyful in their angelic form.
You are free.
My heart has merged with yours,
forest blue, deep and rich and forever.
My mother, my powerful ally,
friend for all ages – goodbye,
the six-month journey to this point
was treacherous, the last weeks, tortuous,
but these final moments were divine,
was God’s grace in full view, mercy
that healed all pain gone before,
resurrection visible like spread-out water lilies
or Elysian Fields, sublime.
My mother, the sky is again yours,
embracing the seen and unseen spectrums.
Your sky is prophecy, feeding
the bedrock and the water’s reflection,
all parts proved sacred, identical
to the immutable moving whole.
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Copyright © 2024 by Allison Grayhurst
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You can listen to the poem by clicking below:
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Read whole poem:
https://allisongrayhurst.com/my-mothers-sky/
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My Mother’s Sky (part 33 of 34)
The night season comes
and Earth is mine to hold,
witness its mark
and its gathering decay
while you sleep in an unconscious
darkening – skin around your mouth
turning blue, and inside that open circle,
inner lips peeling rice-paper fine
and your tongue like a dried log, that I keep sponging,
trying to saturate and regain its malleable form.
Your eyebrows twitch in what the nurses
promise me is not pain, promised me
you are comfortable
even though
for three days and three nights you
have lingered in a grizzly dehydrated shadow-stasis.
These days are like years, ripping away my trust,
my faith, my understanding of mercy,
solidifying the power
of bone-chiselling dread.
I love you, more in your helplessness,
in your patience for the final command, lingering,
red sores forming under your eyes,
fingers cold, purple pale and never grasping.
I stay with you in that place, even when
I sleep, I never sleep without you with me.
I love you and I hurt for you
and I want your release from this
brutal collapse of your form.
Why or even how you are lingering so long,
even the doctor can’t say.
I think you are buffering us from the pain of your loss
I think sometimes maybe mercy burns
hotter than punishment.
And these times
life surpasses understanding,
when the bottom current over quicksand thins,
breaking the chrysalis, clearing the way
for an unwanted redemption.
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Copyright © 2024 by Allison Grayhurst
.
.
You can listen to the poem by clicking below:
.
Read whole poem:
https://allisongrayhurst.com/my-mothers-sky/
.