If it’s true that broken things
are most beautiful, hold me now
to this afternoon light,
elucidate the fissures, spaces
where my mother still survives—
airy as a white moth
that since her death comes
every May. The weekly reader
tells me the price of love
is grief, as if I knew
what I was getting into
when I chased—and sometimes
won—my mother’s love,
which decades later carves an ocean
from my center— hollowness
like bright lights pitched
along Highway 75, coal-black summers
the crickets raced me home. Blinded
to galaxies flourishing in ditches,
shouldering trash, dirt, and hints
of menace. If it is true that broken things
are beautiful, bring back her ashes
scattered at the Mississippi’s mouth,
not far from that highway,
on a morning where air moved
just enough to imagine it was her
pulling hair away from my eyes.
are most beautiful, hold me now
to this afternoon light,
elucidate the fissures, spaces
where my mother still survives—
airy as a white moth
that since her death comes
every May. The weekly reader
tells me the price of love
is grief, as if I knew
what I was getting into
when I chased—and sometimes
won—my mother’s love,
which decades later carves an ocean
from my center— hollowness
like bright lights pitched
along Highway 75, coal-black summers
the crickets raced me home. Blinded
to galaxies flourishing in ditches,
shouldering trash, dirt, and hints
of menace. If it is true that broken things
are beautiful, bring back her ashes
scattered at the Mississippi’s mouth,
not far from that highway,
on a morning where air moved
just enough to imagine it was her
pulling hair away from my eyes.
Darcy Shargo is a poet living and working in rural Maine. She has, at the middle mile, found her voice again and is thrilled to share her work and to have words as tools to deal with the depravities of our current world. When not working or mothering her large brood of five children, she is reading poems, walking in the woods, or staring at late-afternoon light coming in through her office windows.