The Wish
My mother’s words could sail like silk.
She’d raise a finger to her lips,
speak more eloquently than a prayer,
lifting light from darkness.
One Christmas, I asked for an easy-bake oven.
I was six. We were poor.
I didn’t know it then.
Details didn’t seem to matter.
Air dense with words of consolation,
my mother never raised her voice, or eyes
from ironing handkerchiefs, work pants,
her worn cotton house dresses.
Folding my fondest wish, she put it out
of sight.
How else to explain what love can do
with words?
Or the language a mother speaks to her children
as she conjures soup from a bone,
watches the silent, steady whiteness of snow
filter through bare branches.
Christmas, days away.