Visiting My Mother

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NaPoWriMo Day 5:

"This prompt challenges you to find a poem, and then write a new poem that has the shape of the original, and in which every line starts with the first letter of the corresponding line in the original poem."

This one's a lot trickier than it first looks. In addition to adhering to the first letters of the lines in the poem I chose, I also tried to mimic the syllable count. 

I worked off Naomi Shihab Nye's poem, Burning the Old Year.

And as today I got to see my 100-year-old mom in her room again instead of through the looking glass for the first time since Christmas, this poem that came. 

Visiting My Mother

 

Let’s see who she thinks I am today.

Name me—I am her sister

too soon gone, yet always

stitched in her memory,

making her day.

 

Say mother, say daughter, say irrelevant;

loss of one simply leads to the other.

Obscured, I lift my mask to let her

see it’s me, if briefly.

 

When finally her time here ends, she will leave 

a body become ashes, and she’ll head

into the lake she loved, her endmost swim.

 

Quirks I never thought to think I’d miss 

over at last, just memories now 

calling her back, and she will come.

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