Room Suitable for a Tattered Ghost Revisited

Abandoned Living Room

My Mother Read Me

Sleeping Beauty

James Hart 

A poem for my mother,

Alene Wagaman Hart (1918-1990)

If I stir December’s ember fire,
I remember places where beauty lies,
my mother reading sleeping beauty
in darker language of her loving eyes:
she read I love you’s simple wisdom
to open sky and field, stone, tree, and me;
she praised rainbow’s frail iridescence,
and daily prayed for sunset’s divinity.

Recalling this sleeping beauty lost a prince,
her eyes’ wordless loss, her longing heard
among voices calling from empty rooms,
she labored to say her sorrow’s words
at the threshold where the waking day
burned lovely night’s ardent kiss away.

(Poem from an unpublished manuscript
entitled In the Countryside of the Dead)

Note: My mother died on December 2, 1990.

Photo: www.flickriver.com