Creative Expressions/Poetry

My Mother's Last Moments
by David Platzer

My mother,
Only six weeks
To an unexpected death,
That voyage into the unknown,
The fearful night,
Without warning
Into tears.
Her home
Become a labyrinth
With no mortal exit.
It was Christmas without a tree.
No star of Bethlehem
To show the three wise men
The way,
The stable well hidden,
The manger without a baby.
The trees were too expensive,
The country hijacked by billionaires
Out to exterminate the poor by neglect.
My mother wept.
FDR is dead,
Eleanor in heaven
Next to Gandhi and Martin Luther King,
Bob Kennedy a late-comer.
“It’s the greedheads
Who will destroy this country”
Said Lord Buckley,
The nightclub prophet
Broken and crucified in New York City,
Denied a cabaret card.
My mother wept
At what her life had become
And the fate of the world
Ambushed.
Now the only trees for her
Are those that fan her grave
In the middle of a field
Where horses graze
And blackbirds laugh.
The pile of books by her bed
Waiting to be read
Gone to others,
The television’s lies
At last behind her.
It was a cold, drizzling February morning.
Sitting beside the driver,
Smiling Joe Gallagher of Narberth,
I kept thinking
It couldn’t be,
She would surely wake,
That it would be revealed
A nightmare
And that she would emerge
From the box
Where she lay
With some of her favorite books,
Scarves, pictures of us,
Letters, a good luck charm,
Gifts all to the earth and its worms.
O what a gruesome destiny for us all,
As if beauty was only a treat for death.
O why was the winter grass still green
With my mother dead,
The Bush Gang in control,
The worst here not to come?
We drove back to the house
Just as if nothing had happened.

Copyright: David Platzer
Vincennes,
8 October 2002
revised 28 September 2004
95 avenue de la République
94300 Vincennes
France
platzerd@yahoo.fr
0033 1 43 743085
0033 6 63 79 71 87

My Mother's Last Moments, by David Platzer
My Father's Vigil, by David Platzer
Uncle Kenny, Home in Heaven, by David Platzer
George Harrison, by David Platzer

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