by Martin Willitts Jr
My mother’s age-ravaged memory
before she passed away.
What a strange phrase, “passed away,”
as if floating off. How odd to be less
mentioned over time.
Winds come; winds go.
Winds blow the moon away. Winds blow
the yellow off the finches, scatters leaves,
memory, sorrow
blows them all into a dark reckoning.
I guided my mother’s faltering steps,
as she stumbled through the hospital halls,
her feet forgetting how to walk.
Tell me what can be left behind.
I will tell you about finches, leaves,
how we fall in and out of memory.
Martin Willitts Jr is an editor for Comstock Review. He won 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022. His 21 full-length collections include the Blue Light Award 2019, “The Temporary World”. His recent books are “Ethereal Flowers” (Shanti Arts Press, 2023); “Rain Followed Me Home” (Glass Lyre Press, 2023); and “Leaving Nothing Behind” (Fernwood Press, 2023); “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” (Shanti Arts Press, 2024) and “All Beautiful Things Need Not Fly” (Silver Bowl Press, 2024)