Everything is Ashes
Mothers know their children
but mothers don’t know everything.
They can’t imagine their child dying
before they do,
having to dig them out of the snow in a faraway place
only to bury them again.
You once said,
“Everything is ashes.
The earth is the ashes of the sun.
The sun is the ashes of the galaxy”
so matter of fact, as if anyone let alone
a three-year-old boy playing with toys in the bathtub
would know what becomes of us.
In your quiet way, you offered a latter comfort,
a Chinese proverb,
a Rumanian prayer,
to mothers everywhere.
A way to think of death
after the train stops,
and we leap to our mile marker.
You said everything is.
And so perhaps children are the ashes of the earth.
