Requiescat for Bernadean

For days, I could not reach my mother,

Bernadean, living alone in the family home.

Each noon I would call her and laugh 

about our mutual biography. 

 

The night when she was found on the floor 

at home, phone calls were rife with grief and plans. 

Becoming orphaned at 51 had happened to her, too.

She and her mother chimed. That gift does not 

 

easily lift. The hollow my mother left 

matched the inside of her violin. That fine, 

slender wood she loved and hated, for 

the perfectionist she was. She was revered 

as a teacher, was invited to attend

the fiftieth anniversary of 

the high school class she taught, the students her age.

She'd skipped grades. There was the war then.

 

I have a photograph of Mom at her desk,

holding a pencil in her right hand that

propped up her face. Textbooks before her.

She is smiling. Her lush titian hair 

 

cannot be discerned in the black and white

I prefer for its affectionate 

accuracy of the soul. Showing her love

of reading until the proverbial

 

Midwestern cows come home,

to be watched in the field,

the smell of corn and syllables

in black and white.