Metamorphosis

The week after you died, Mom,
you were in my checkout line,
little old lady who met my stare
with the fear, the yearning
of a mortal chosen by a god,
feeling herself change
painfully cell by cell
into a shadow, a laurel, you, a constellation.

Copyright © 2013 by James Richardson. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on May 28, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.