Compulsively larger than life,
mom swaggered out loud.
Her eyes you could get lost in,
and they gripped like a drug.
The Virgin Mary twerking in a thong,
always herself but never the same,
never quite right
but never completely wrong,
she made me feel proud
and destroyed me with shame.
Breaching all boundaries
but always dancing just
out of reach, with a shrug
and a quick incantation of hair
she took men to places
they couldn’t get out of
and left them there.
A moody April morning, silver and grey.
This little poem, handed to his therapist
a dozen years before, was part
of what he ached to read at her funeral today.
But now, as a breathy soloist
scooped out the final bits of Amazing Grace,
he could not bring himself to be her judge,
to stoop and fling at her the sludge
caked on the bottom of a damaged heart.
Instead he simply read, “Perfect love
casts out fear ... ” can you hear that now, mom?
“ ... Now we see dimly, then face to face ... ”
With a startled smile he realized that she
one final time had birthed him to a place
he couldn’t get out of.
Charles R. Strietelmeier, author of Singing Flames and Gargoyles, is a retired Lutheran pastor.
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