One Motherless Hour

Today’s draft was hard to contain. The journal entry that started this poem wandered down several roads, all of them rich and interesting. This is an attempt to follow one of the paths.

My mother lived in Japan during the Great Hanshin Earthquake.

At home, the newspapers said that her neighborhood disappeared.

Nothing left. 

I sat numb for one motherless hour

Until my brother called,

Told me she was okay. 

Did you know that the newer buildings in Japan are built on rollers 

so that during an earthquake, they sway instead of crumbling?  

The night of the earthquake my mother dreamt 

Of her father and a freight train.

Dream diesel engines transforming to

shifting groans of the earthquake in progress. 

Shortly afterward, we learned his cancer had come back.

He was choosing hospice care. 

I called him from work to say goodbye. 

My grandmother answered and told me (in her gramma-sweet way)

he would not come to the phone. 

It’s too sad, she said. 

And because I am my grandfather’s granddaughter,

 I did not shout or curse 

or say “Of course it’s fucking sad. Get his dying ass on the phone.”

I said “Okay” and “I love you.”

I went to his funeral where my mother,

having flown in from Japan,

reached for my hand as they closed his casket.