It's Still Life

The Difficulties of Dogwoods and Lilacs

There was this worry,
that we’d wear out her name.
Mum! Mum! The way you’d wear out
your Sunday best shoes if you wore
them on Tuesdays or Thursdays.

The years have carved us into
a difficult relationship, but
I have learned a lot from my mother –
so I never smacked my children.
I chose words like treasures

because they can scar, get carried
around like a fat arse that
everyone tries to ignore, and
that scar just continues to hum
even when no one can remember

its words. I spoke to Mum yesterday,
wished her a happy Mother’s Day.
She said she got a tray of seedlings
from my sister. The tag says they’re
asters, but they’re not, Mum said,

they’re zinnias. Don’t much like ‘um.
And, she said, the dogwood trees
are blooming. Last year they dug up
the maple trees because the roots
upended the pavements. (She tells me

this every time we speak, and it
was 4-years ago, not last year.)
I remember the dogwood tree outside
my bedroom window at our house, I said,
and Mum says, that was a lilac bush.

No, definitely a dogwood, I say,
I remember it blooming every year
when I studied for final exams.
Lilac, she insists, I remember it,
and you flunked most of your exams.

So I change the subject. Like I said,
I’ve learned a lot from Mum – when
and how to pick my battles, and how
to turn a conversation before it
becomes an eternal scar because

my mum also taught me that we love
each other even when it’s not easy.

written for the grand reopening of Poetic Bloomings.