Mother’s Day, 2024

Rounding the corner, we encounter a scent.
Perhaps a sound. It takes us back. Back

to the long hallway of home. A Sunday afternoon
in autumn. Mama ironing her boy’s line-dried,

Niagara-starched, cotton shirts for another week
of college. Or she’s hurrying along her four sons

Bruting it up before the family’s one bathroom
mirror on their sister’s wedding day. It could be

the swoosh of a blood pressure cup that transports
us to the front porch where at sixty, she studies

to be a nurse or to her bed in the dark paneled room
when she’s almost ninety, where her daughter recognizes

a change. Maybe it’s the hardware store’s purple
petunias this Mother’s Day reminding us of her belief

that seeds begin to swell with the growing of the moon
that life starts all over with the warming rays of spring.

Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash