Like a Rock
I carry my mother
like a rock in my pocket
that I just can’t seem to throw away
It serves me
no purpose,
it just weighs me down
~~~
When I first found it,
when I first picked it up
and started carrying it with me,
I thought it so beautiful –
I could look at it for hours
But, like my mother,
it never looked back at me,
never grew warm under my loving gaze
For the longest, I was blind to that,
Blind to anything but the beauty,
blind to the cold, hard,
beyond-remote nature of the rock,
of my mother,
my stone
~~~
I carry my mother,
a thought without weight
And she’s heavier
and she’s colder
than all the stones
there are
~~~
By the time I recognized her
immutable, emotional unavailability,
I had run out of joy,
felt depleted of hope –
But I could not,
for the life of me,
stop seeking a beauty, a warmth,
inside her heart
Could not stop
wishing
that one day this stone,
my mother,
deep inside my pocket,
Might just become
its own opposite –
Change from hard to fluid,
from cold to warm
But my rock, my hard burden,
will only turn to water
When my mother
stops being
a stone
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