My Mother's Funeral- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ira Sadoff

Ira Sadoff was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 7, 1945,...
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		Poems About Mothers
		Disciplines [If there is prayer, there is a mother kneeling] by Dawn Lundy Martin

		Kaddish, Part I by Allen Ginsberg

		Chorus by Catherine Barnett

		Exile by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

		Getting Close by Victoria Redel

		Jugglers by Francisco Aragón

		Lucky by Tony Hoagland

		Mama, Come Back by Nellie Wong

		Metamorphosis by James Richardson

		Mother by Herman de Coninck

		Mother by Lola Ridge

		Mother Ann Tells Lucy What Gave Her Joy by Arra Lynn Ross

		Mother o' Mine by Rudyard Kipling

		Mother's Day by David Young

		My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer by Mark Strand

		My Mother Was No White Dove by Reginald Shepherd

		My Mother Would Be a Falconress by Robert Duncan

		Parents by William Meredith

		Picking Up by Evelyn Duncan

		Poems about Motherhood

		Postpartum by Hiromi Itō

		She Leaves Me Again, Six Months Later by Collier Nogues

		The Player Queen by W. B. Yeats

		The Routine Things Around the House by Stephen Dunn

		The Visit by Jason Shinder

		To My Mother by Robert Louis Stevenson

		To My Mother by Edgar Allan Poe

		To My Mother by Christina Rossetti

		To My Mother Waiting on 10/01/54 by Teresa Carson

		Untitled [A house just like his mother's] by Gregory Orr

		Wedding Cake by Naomi Shihab Nye

		[Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome] by Christina Rossetti

My Mother's Funeral
by Ira Sadoff

The rabbi doesn't say she was sly and peevish, fragile and voracious, disheveled, voiceless and useless, at the end of her very long rope. He never sat beside her like a statue while radio voices called to her from God. He doesn't say how she mamboed with her broom, staggered, swayed, and sighed afternoons, till we came from school to feed her. She never frightened him, or bent to kiss him, sponged him with a fever, never held his hand, bone-white, bolted doors and shut the blinds. She never sent roaches in a letter, he never saw her fall down stairs, dead sober. He never watched her sweep and murmur, he never saw spider webs she read as signs her life was over, long before her frightened husband left, long before they dropped her in a box, before her children turned shyly from each other, since they never learned to pray. If I must think of her, if I can spare her moment on the earth, I'll say she was one of God's small sculptures, polished to a glaze, one the wind blew off a shelf.

"My Mother's Funeral," from Grazing, published by the University of Illinois Press. Used by permission of the author. All rights reserved.