Poets’ Corner: Feela for Mother’s Day (In Memorium)

12 May Poets’ Corner: Feela for Mother’s Day (In Memorium)

Mother’s Day holds a wholly different meaning for anyone whose mom has passed away. Poems become tributes and hope to offer comfort – like this one from poet (and regular Telluride Inside… and Out contributor) David Feela:

“This is a poem of memory that tries to look in two directions: into the living past, and into a present where my mother has been absent from this world for a long time. It conjures a childhood memory that can’t help recognizing an ever-present feeling of loss.”

A Cache

(for Cecilia, my mother,  January 3, 1919 – May 25, 1992)

I hand my mother her purse

and the world starts over,

fossils climb out of their graves,

glaciers swerve north

and circle the arctic

like confused seagulls.

She digs deep into that mystery of things

snatched out of the air and swallowed,

things she keeps to herself.

No one explains to the boy

how this purse fixes his mother

to the ground, how without it

she’d streak like a comet

back toward the first penny of time.

I hand my mother her purse

and she’s lost to the moment,

mumbling into its fullness,

the mouth unclasped and yawning,

all her mind coming loose,

fingers working through the heap

like a knot of worms.

About David Feela:

David Feela is a retired high school English teacher who lives and writes in Cortez. He produces monthly columns for The Four Corners Free Press and The Durango Telegraph. His chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. His full length poetry collection, The Home Atlas, and his new book of essays, How Delicate These Arches, was chosen as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.