Montis: Delivery of Letters to Mother

The poet, now all out of poetry,

lies in pink sheets, embroidered with snowflakes,

crowns of ice dangling from vines.

His head, now almost a mirror image of Yorick,

propped up by a pillow for them all to see,

once held a million stanzas, all held upright.

Eyes sunken into their sockets,

the bluest blue just before sunset

and fingers still in the position to hold a pen.

And the other poets come.

And the young ones come.

And they come to study him,

to feel full on his presence,

to soak up the majesty of so much

unexplainable talent,

to pick from the air

any fresh rhymes

like fireflies trapped in jars.

Now his eyes peer out

as far as his propped-up head

will allow his vision to capture

and his thinned lips part,

and he reveals his dearest poem -

the last letter to his mother -

and soon his letter will be delivered

in person and the boy he was,

standing at end of his dying mother’s bed,

will at last have leave to leave the spot

where the needle of his memory has stood still

and he could only navigate the world in words.