Birthday
How was it the day my mother entered the world,
the third daughter of a mother whose husband
drowned a few months earlier? Was there joy
in the room, or some blue note of grief?
Did she resemble the lost father, her eyes
the blue of the lake that took him?
Was it a year when March went out
like a lion or a lamb?
My mother loved the spring, wearing
the tints of the pink dogwood, silken tulip,
salmon zinnia. She buried my grandmother
in lilac, never wearing that color again.
The jonquil played too bold for her, too much
the trumpet. She was an Easter woman, full
of resurrection. She never doubted what
was put into the earth would push up,
transformed by light.
Spring comes too early this year in Michigan.
A day of eighty degrees next door to a high
of forty. The weeping cherry blizzards
with blooms. They drift on the porch steps.
I put the heater in the fish pond, I take it out
The red-winged blackbird returns. My mother,
gone four years in April, does not. Today
would mark her eighty-nine. Today began
crinkled with sun, perforated with bird chirp.
Now grey clouds lap the sky. Cumulus
tides rise. Still, one bluet winks up
from the winter mulch.
2/27/12
By Anita Skeen, who is a professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities (RCAH) at Michigan State University, where she is the arts coordinator and director of the RCAH Center for Poetry. Recently she was writer-in-residence at the Aurora Fall Writers Retreat in Aurora, West Virginia; in January 2012 she will serve as writer-in-residence at Converse College.
