He
travels with half
his
mother’s ashes across the sea,
to
the other place she lived away
from
him, her East-West selves
grounded
in a storied geography:
Here
is the river I knew as a girl—
That’s
the town where I met him—
her
voice a swirl of distant sounds
he
knows he will forget. He thinks
“dust
to dust” a poor cliché, the grains
he
now carries more like seeds to be
planted:
which one would open in July
with
a bloom the size of her fist,
which
would grow straight then bend
as
if to lift a child who looks like him?
—by
Laurel Smith
Bio:
Laurel Smith lives in Vincennes, Indiana, and happily participates in
projects to promote literacy and the arts. Her poetry has appeared in
various periodicals, including Natural Bridge, New Millennium
Writings, Tipton Poetry Review, Flying Island, English Journal, JAMA:
Journal of the AMA; also in the following anthologies: And
Know This Place,
Visiting Frost,
and Mapping the Muse.