Patricia Whiting Fine Arts

The call, when it came,
was in the afternoon.
Not in the middle of the night.
A siesta begun in purgatory,
ending in pure light.

Susan carried her ashes
to the distant cemetery
and placed them alongside
our father’s grave.
It gave her closure, she said.
For me, it came in a dream.

In my dream I’m delivering
a bouquet of daisies–
the kind that grows wild
by the side of the road.

I seem to know instinctively
when I’ve reached my destination–
the top floor of a multistoried
modern building, which turns into
a hospital as I exit from the elevator.

My mother is standing in a doorway.
I don’t recognize her at first
because she is the young mother
of my childhood.
She extends her hand and I give her
the bouquet of daisies.

The scene shifts abruptly
to a country estate
where we sit on the greensward
under a canopy of trees.

It is not a place to which
I’ve ever been, but seems
more like the setting
of a film. And we,
like actors called back
to reshoot a scene,
using a revised script,
act out the scene
we were constrained
from acting out in life:

My mother holds me close
in her embrace,
and I cry out,
“I love you! Oh, I love you.!”