Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Ritual

My mother swore nights
were her betes noires.
Putting the beast to sleep
with pills, she sacrificed
a theater of dreams.

Before she died
at sixty-three she was bitter,
hard as the rock she left me.
There is no pity in a heart-
shaped diamond.

Father liked things light-
a sunny day at Jones Beach.
He never read a word I wrote.
Too messy--my inside stuff
leaking out like menstrual blood.

When fortune frowned,
he shed his past three times.
Wives and work came easy.
At eighty-two he was
a wax figure of himself.

I didn't weep at their funerals.
I'll keep unburying them
in poems until I'm free.


(c)Jane Ellen Glasser
published in Skipping Stones 2007
Mindworm Press, Chesapeake, VA

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