whom I have never met but whose
lines have touched me again and again,

who is chronicling her gradual decline,
but I do not cry for my dead mother?

Is it because my mother was not a poet?
(She did leave behind some heartfelt haiku.)

Or is it because my 93-year-old mother
refused to believe that she was dying,

that she could not be dying, because, if
she willed it so, she could live to be 120?

I imagine the gifted poet at home with her
daughter, the 19-year-old caregiver in

one poem, along with the poet’s husband and
their son, all hoping that she lives to see her

next book published by her fall birthday.
I am the poet who does not like to remember

my mother angry in the middle of the night,
demanding that I help her out of her hospital

bed in the family room, to sit on the commode,
which she could not do—her muscles gone

gelatinous as a jellyfish, her once formidable
spine unable to support her, though she

insisted it would. Instead, I envision the poet
still laughing with friends before she slips

into a cocoon from which she will not emerge,
her limbs stilled, her last soft I love yous

before the disease steals her voice, the tenderness
of her family caring for her, hating to lose her.

And I wish that we might have had that
kind of sweet sorrow in the house where

our mother raised the two daughters who
tended her. That, whether she wanted it

or not, she was writing her final lines in
our company, that she might somehow

have murmured words of love we hoped
she must have felt for us, as I imagine

the poet living into her dying is doing
with her beloveds, endearments that

she whispered in their tiny ears when
she first held them in her arms.

•••

(for Martha Silano, with love and appreciation)

You can see a terrific short video, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,”
about poet Martha Silano, who is living with ALS, here.