Mother memories

 

It could be the painting in my bathroom

Always hung on mum’s bedroom wall

Evokes such memories – it’s dusky pink frame

It can be something or nothing at all

 

The Royal Worcester dish used this Christmas Day

She gave me one time as a birthday gift

It could be something, it could be nothing

It could be just as small as this

 

The echo of some of her sayings

“It looks black over Bill’s mothers”,

“I go to the foot of our stairs”

Make me smile and there’s so many more

Her humour was funny and earthy and raw

 

The knitted, multi-coloured crochet-edged shawl

A soap on TV, a flowered overall

It can be something, it can be nothing,

It can be anything at all …..

 

I’m ironing an old lace white hankie

An “M” is stitched into the corner

The m’s not for Meg but for mum – she was Mary

And of some memories I’m cautious,

Of some I am wary

 

But mostly I’d say time is a healer

And it’s sometimes nothing at all

That prompts a quickening deep inside

When I’m happy to dwell on my memory-time.