For My Mother, Dying

by Catherine Abbey Hodges | Jun 20, 2018 | Poetry | 0

Here you’re dying and all
I can think of is birth
and how you are,
as ever, more

than meets the eye: both
laboring mother and stubborn
infant laboring too,
tunneling toward

what isn’t wheeling
seagulls, not a hammered silver
bay—toward what’s nothing
I can name:

so much everything
and all at once,
all particle, all wave.

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Photo used under CC.

About The Author

Catherine Abbey Hodges

Catherine Abbey Hodges’s most recent collection of poems is Raft of Days. Dan Gerber selected her first full-length collection, Instead of Sadness, as winner of the 2015 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize from Gunpowder Press. Her poems have appeared widely and been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily. Co-coordinator of California Poets in the Schools for Tulare County, Catherine collaborates with her husband, cellist Rob Hodges, and was named 2017 faculty of the year at Porterville College, where her students keep her awake and amazed.

For My Mother, Dying

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About The Author

Catherine Abbey Hodges

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