Mama
A poem about grief, memory, and the ways love lingers in the body
I can picture her walker,
red, steady, sure.
Hear the clickety clack it makes on the tile.
I can feel the laughter in the air
that circled her in orbit,
trailing in and around her.
The catch for her rises in my throat
like a name I won’t speak
It presses against my ribs,
Surging.
December does this:
turns memory into a live wire.
Every quiet moment
a doorway she doesn’t walk through.
I tell myself I’m fine.
I’m not.
I miss her
in ways the body remembers
before the mind does.
The poem feels like someone whispering a memory they’re afraid will disappear if spoken too loudly.
The red walker isn’t just an object it’s a trace of her, a small pulse of presence in the room.
The “clickety clack” becomes a sound the heart still leans toward, hoping she might turn the corner again.
Laughter hangs around her like a soft weather, something the body remembers before the mind catches up.
Grief rises physically, a tightening that knows her name even when the lips refuse to say it.
December sharpens everything, turning memory into something that stings and glows at the same time.
Every quiet moment becomes a threshold where her absence feels almost like a hand brushing past.
The insistence on being “fine” breaks open into the truth of longing that can’t be reasoned away.
Missing her becomes a sensation in the ribs, in breath, in muscle a kind of embodied
remembering.
The poem holds this ache tenderly, reminding us that love keeps living in the body long after loss.
I felt this in my heart. I was just thinking of my Dad, so this made so much sense. Thank you for sharing.