On Mother’s Day they came
Back to their childhood home
Carrying their mother’s ashes
Hearing the voice of her wishes,
“I want my ashes to feed the roses.”
I woke up on Mother’s Day with a funeral outside the tall windows of the Master’s bedroom. The old man who built this home had passed decades ago, but his wife, the woman who looked out those tall windows in loneliness all those decades to the rosebush that blooms red in the California winter, just recently died.
And her children, who themselves have grown old and lonely, formed a procession outside what are now our windows and fed her ashes to the rosebush to fill their dead mother’s last request. This is what I did on Mothers’ Day. I walked outside and stood in my grey wool dress and red shoes, and silently hugged these lonely people before they walked back to their cars and drove away. I had nothing to say. There was nothing that needed to be said.
Later my daughter picked a ripe rose from the bush and gave it to me. The rose looked plump, juicy, full of life. Too soon the petals will dry and crumble to dust, just like the woman whose ashes joined the dirt under the bush. I hugged my daughter tight, smelled the freshness of the sun in her hair. On this Mothers’ Day I am alive, juicy, maybe even a tiny bit plump. I feed on the ashes of those who have died, smack my lips and say, “I’m alive!” Someday it will be my ashes that will feed another rose, and it will be the sexiest, most fertile ashes any rose has ever fed on. She will smack her lips and look up to the sky quivering in ecstasy.
“I’m alive!”
(Update: Read the edited version below.)
I am stunned by this piece.
No comments in the comments section of this post, not really a surprise, I suppose. (You know, that was to sound a bit sarcastic, but considering the audience’s statistical demographic… I find myself a bit sad for, “we, the audience.”) I’m saying, that this is one of the better things I’ve read in quite some time.
Not that it’s perfect, mind you, but this little short stanza reminds me of something by Emily Dickinson or Charlotte Brontë. In the classic sense of literary criticism: the poem isn’t terribly moving nor emotional, and the last paragraph has a tone that’s askew to the monumental resonance of the two paragraphs that clef them in twain.
But those two paragraphs! Are… simply… amazing…
They describe an arc of an entire novel, the pathos of three generations with their lifetime’s of love lost, and spirits waned by time’s march and life’s obligations…. A distilled reduction into two… simple… paragraphs…
Really, that is excellent writing.
I just thought someone should say so…
Thank you, Sean. I admit I began to hurry after the second paragraph. I’ve revised it with your suggestions in mind:
On Mother’s Day they came
Back to their childhood home
Carrying their mother’s ashes
Hearing the voice of her wishes,
“I want my ashes to feed the roses.”
I woke up on Mother’s Day with a funeral outside the tall windows of the Master’s bedroom. The old man who built this home had passed decades ago, but his wife, the woman who looked out those tall windows in loneliness all those decades to the rosebush that blooms red in the California winter, just recently died.
And her children, who themselves have grown old and lonely, formed a procession outside what are now our windows and fed her ashes to the rosebush to fill their dead mother’s last request. This is what I did on Mothers’ Day. I walked outside and stood in my grey wool dress and red shoes, and silently hugged these lonely people before they walked back to their cars and drove away. I had nothing to say. There was nothing that needed to be said.
Later my daughter picked a ripe rose from the bush and gave it to me. The rose looked plump, juicy, full of life. Too soon the petals will dry and crumble to dust, just like the woman whose ashes joined the dirt under the bush. I hugged my daughter tight, smelled the freshness of the sun in her hair.
I gave in to the thought of my greatest fear: that my husband would leave me too soon, that I would one day take the place of the woman looking out the same tall windows of the Masters bedroom, and that after I have withered in loneliness I too would be sprinkled at the foot of the rosebush. An offering in exchange for a ripe red rose.
I fit the rose within the thin lip of a crystal vase, appeasing its cut with water from the sink. I sank my own body in a bath, attempting to dissolve my fears. That night my man and I made love. Our sex is a violent act of defiance against decay and death. A fuck-you to the gods who watched from the seat of immortality and boredom.
Outside the rosebush bore witness to our passion and rebellion. It taunted me, claimed my ashes even as our naked flesh glistened with sweat and come. My man and I spoke of perversions as if they would preserve our youth, magic incantations to release us from the rosebush’s bonds. We know we are doomed. No one has defeated death. Not rosebushes, not humans, not even gods whose names very slowly through the ages eventually succumb to oblivion.
But until then our rituals of life challenge the call of the grave. I look out these tall windows naked and shameless, ready to frolic and fuck. You will not have me, you thorny fragrant beautiful bush, until I have exhausted every bit of life I can muster from my body. You will not feed off my loneliness and grief. Wait, you will, and for a very long time. You may even die before I’m through. Such things are not beyond circumstance. Only time will tell.