It's Still Life

My-My-My

My mum lived in a little blue house
at the top of a hill where lodgepole pines
leaned in the wind like a widow’s hump,
and there was a creek, raged full when it
rained, but the soil sucked it dry by July,

(I’m being generous when I say “creek” –
it was more like a drainage ditch),

and behind the house was a tilting shed
full of drying wood where black snakes
with red long stripes lived and fed on
anything that just happened to fly by

(I hate snakes, and hated that they jumped
at me when fetching firewood from the pile),

and there was something called a shrew
(Excuse me, Mum, but that’s a rat!) that
lived in the pump house by the well, and
to the left of the sagging, slack clothesline
was a row of raspberries  and to the right
was a row of blueberries that deer ate
when Mum wasn’t looking, although
if she saw them, she’d throw stones at them, 

(I wish she’d taught me to throw like that),

and she lived in her blue house for years
after Dad died, all alone on 5-acres with
a kitchen garden that kept her fed all year,

(and not even a cat to keep her company),

but one night as she slept a 16-year old boy 
(who I’m sure has grown into an exemplary man)
broke into her house, took her wallet and
her money and Dad’s gold retirement watch
with the dead battery, and it was that incident
that changed her mind about living alone,
all isolated in her blue house. She didn’t

think twice. Sold up and moved into a little
flat in town, where she planted flowers and
vegetables in their communal grounds.
Mum said she felt safe there, but said her
elbows were a bit pinned to her sides,
and whenever she drove around, every
third word she uttered was my-my-my.

A Stream of Consciousness for Linda Hill that begins with ‘my’ and ends with ‘my’, plus a prompt from  dVerse: using a poetic device called a Soliloquy. The image is mine, as in I sketched and painted it from an old photo. Shared with @Experimentsinfc #APoemADay on Twitter   ©Misky 2021