Waiting

I was packing when my mother died,
on my way from Hawaii
to Amsterdam
but dropping by to see her first.
No one warned me she was nearly gone.

I know nothing about death,
its arrival, its departure, whether she met
death sleeping or awake. They said
she’d stopped eating.
What happened before that?

She tried to be Katherine Hepburn
instead of the fifth of six
girls in a poor Catholic family
far from Boston, badgered by her father
to attend mass,

mostly ignored by her mother
who tired of children
after seven
(one died) but went on
to birth seven more. What brutes

men are. I’m happy my mother defied him
though she went on to marry
a worse one.
We’re so alike in stubbornness
& valor

though we never learned
how not to squabble, how not to lie.
Many nights
she plays in my dreams
always young, vibrant, always taken for granted

because she never left.
Somewhere in some lonesome home
she’s still waiting
for me, I’m still trying
to arrive.

Esther Jones Peters in the 1980s