For You, My Mother 

Your name was Pearl.

That seems so fitting somehow,

Your subtle beauty and inner strength

Formed by life’s abrasions,

A parallel to the abrasive sand

that forms the oyster’s jewel.

You were eighty-five when I entered

your life again,

Brought to you in this place for the

confused and aged

By circumstances that mock the words

of those who would claim the process of life

to be just happenstance.

I remember your eyes,

As clear a blue as a mid-summer sky.

So full of an undaunted sparkle,

A hint of the rebellious spirit that time

Only thought it had thwarted.

I remember your hair,

As white as a pure winter’s snow,

Forming a halo round your aging face.

Showing the struggles of years of injustices,

And the patient waiting for what

your attendants could not even imagine.

That meeting of our lives ended a quest

for answers we’d both been seeking

for more than forty years.

You gave my past to me,

And I ended your past for you.

What tenacity you must have had to hold on to life

for all those years,

Not knowing where I was, or what life had done to me.

Then I appeared.

And the waiting was complete.

I saw you let go of the ties that bound you

to this life

And ten months later you died.

I try to reason what your life was all about.

Those forty some years inside the walls

of isolation.

What meaning could there be.

I close my mind to the pain it brings

for all those years I cannot change.

Perhaps your meaning lies in me.

Your strength passed on when

I might have faltered in living out the

traumas that life held out for me.

Your song that lay unsung

for want of someone to hear.

My song unsung,

because I believed I could not sing.

My meaning lies in this:

To hear the melody that lies within,

A legacy from you.

Then sing the song you would have sung

And sing the song I’ve found to sing

Combined together in

harmony with life.

         Charlotte Schmidt