Mary Beth

Sitting in spring church clothes

eating spaghetti your sisters boiled from a box

you probably bought last fall,

I see your kitchen for the first time-

grand and warm, a poor girl’s dream,

and learn your girls have voices like flutes.

I discover you’ve just had your walls painted

in the same colors as my new house,

3000 miles and a lifetime away-

colors called liberty path, spring meadow,

and maple syrup, pigments and names

from our common childhoods.

Meeting your young daughters I see

they have hair that matches yours, a shade

like the dahlias’ opening on my front porch,

and their father talks of the ski trip

they will take one day to teach them how-

because you wanted them to ski, like me.        

We reunite on this April day in your house

after the wake, the funeral, the burial,

the long sad drive I make alone in a rented car,

after too many years, and I grieve

it can’t be you who shows me your home

so like the dreamy sketches we made on tracing paper as girls.




Today's NaPoWriMo prompt was to write about something or someone you left behind.  This poem is about a childhood friend I, sadly, only had rare contact with as we got busy with our grown up lives.