Mother’s Day


and if she did live forever
we would call up armless men,
up out of the ground, that grow
where hens’ teeth are planted,
to run aimlessly back and forth
across the miniature rhomboid lawn
until some burrow under the fence,
some fall into the pool and drown,
gradually thinning into transparency
as the summer loses interest.
the rest, one by one, are caught
in the raspberry thorns, flapping
their forked toes and useless
little pink wings, after devouring
all the birdseed left in the feeder.
it would give her something else
to complain about
.


©2001 F.J. Bergmann

"Mother’s Day" appeared on horselesspress.com winter 2005, and also in Marilyn Taylor's article on mother-daughter poetry on writermag.com.

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