Uprooted

A poem about my mother; may she rest peacefully forever.

She'd never felt the chill of northern winds,
Never seen a deer standing on lake turned to ice,
She'd never crunched a blade of frosted grass,
Nor seen her words written in the air
like ghosts reminding her of what she'd said.

She gloried, rather, in the warmth of the sun,
Told time by the turning of the tide,
Smelled salt, and sand, and sunscreens on the air,
And she danced to the pitter-patter of the rainstorms,
awaiting the vision of serenity that would follow.

A harsh fall storm could ravage a young maple in the north,
Could tear away the golden leaves, could split the sturdy trunk,
Could leave it broken, and bare, and brittle before the winter,
And so the frost would be too much, and the spring would not be enough
to give the maple back it's life; and so the youth would be lost.

A palm, however, could survive a hurricane, bending gracefully with the wind
And if it were to be wounded, were to loose a leaf or a bit of bark,
The sunrise after, the ocean's calm, and the soothing summer breezes
Were sure to breathe life into it, to nurse the broken beauty back to health,
and so the palm would be invincible, eternal, unchanging.

Her life had always been about survival – about the search for the calm;
She danced to the rain because crying hadn't worked,
She walked the beaches every morning looking for absolution,
And every evening her heart sank with the sun into the waves,
because the day had been another failure, and the night would bring another storm.

She went north for peace, for a way out of the cruel cycle of storms life had shown her,
She went to save herself and her children, and to find reprieve in a new place.
She knew she would miss the sea, and the long, warm summers,
But she was a palm – she bent with the storms, she saw over the horizon, and
she thought herself invincible.

A palm uprooted is no stronger than a newborn child
It needs to be placed into warm, familiar land,
Needs to be caressed by the sun and the breeze,
Not thrown into a foreign soil, not asked to survive without aid,
and certainly not expected to adapt to frosty winters.

It never occurred to her to cover her slender legs with bulky layers,
She'd never dressed her daughters in pants and boots and duck-feather down,
The cold had never kept her in the bars overlong, had never forced the whisky in,
And she was unprepared for the duration of the winter, for the harshness of the cold;
she had never seen a storm without the calm.

She did her best to fan the warm flame of life, to keep herself alive and fighting,
She tried to put the hot liquor down and learn to mother in the north,
But, like the wounded maple whose visage would forever be frozen in death,
Her heart and her drive and her soul, so riddled with tragedy, were too weak to survive
and so her heart frosted over, and her fire burned out, and no amount of sun could bring her back.