Motherless Son

Now, too, my mother gone
What a can of monkeys

Photos never tell the truth
Or they do, much too much too much too much
I try not to think about myself

But there you are looking at me
You loved my mother
You missed your mother
I loved my mother
She told us, “your soul is zero”

Brainwashed by the nuns, we’d always say
I loved my nuns, she’d reply

How do you ruin your children?
Proverb: It’s difficult to be stupid
To move out of this maze
Easy to be smart, maybe,

Copyright © 2024 by Charlotte Meehan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 21, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I wrote this poem shortly after my mother died, the year following my husband’s passing at the height of Covid [due to] complications from Parkinson’s disease. Observing these two loved ones from a distance has taught me that another person’s genuine friendship with a difficult mother can exist in beautiful contradiction with the pain of embedded longing and even reveal that mother’s ability to love in ways previously inaccessible. We are all, in the end, swarms of mysterious, irreconcilable cells that randomly select and bruise each other’s insides through both accident and choice.”
—Charlotte Meehan