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My scrolling photo display starts up in the kitchen at six every morning. Often it’s my mother smiling out at me. Hi Mom, I say to her, and then I stand watching: my mother leans back in a park chair in Old Forge, face upturned to the sun. My mother stands next to my daughter, both of them holding ice cream. My mother crouches next to her firstborn baby, a look of utter love on her face.

You can’t be an orphan when you’re a woman in your sixties, except that you can. How wrong she wasn’t here for last week’s election results. How wrong she won’t be here to decorate a Christmas tree. How wrong she can’t laugh at her great-granddaughter’s adoration of the stained hard plastic baby doll she drags everywhere. It has been exactly one year now since we took turns at the microphone in the church. The world churns on. I will never stop missing her.

November 1, 1975, by Lucille Clifton

My mother is white bones
in a weed field
on her birthday.
She who would be sixty
has been sixteen years
absent at celebrations.
For sixteen years of minutes
she has been what is missing.
This is just to note
the arrogance of days
continuing to happen
as if she were here.


​Click here for more information about the one and only Lucille Clifton.

alisonmcghee.com
My poetry podcast: Words by Winter