Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Silver Secrets


My computer allows me
to peer into an osprey nest
high above birches
in an Estonian forest.

Celebrating life, I remember
death. I see only my mother,
cold and lifeless at three a.m.,
in a hospital room across town.

The irony of time haunts
my enjoyment of the intimacy
of nature—a mother tending
her hatchlings--oblivious

to the miles that separate
watcher and watched, and I
wonder if she sees them, too.
How she loved driving

by the osprey nest high
above the road, straining
to see the bird she'd only seen
in pictures in her worn book.

Transported from Missouri
to Minnesota, she still marveled
that she had traveled, had
summered out of state.

And now, I can see what
she would have loved to have seen.
The unfairness of time's advance
causes me to look away, deny my gaze.

1 comment:

  1. enjoyed your poem in the every day poems...today. that sentence just sounds odd...doesn't it?

    nance
    (rhymes with dance)

    ReplyDelete