What My Mother Kept

Chat GPT produced the image, according to my detailed prompt.

 

 

Mother's Day, and I miss my mother so much. 

She was born on a summer day in 1930, and died exactly eighty-one years later.

The poem below, "What You Kept" is one of the series "Four Songs of Parting" which appears in my collection, The Frangible Hour.

What You Kept

 

A mildewed trunk defending old receipts,

a cookie tin,

discolored carpets, pillowcases, sheets.

Easy enough, as are the Mason jars—

stuff for the trash or the recycling bin,

the church bazaars.

I toss aside what’s always needled me—

the plaque from John Paul’s Holy Jubilee,

the Norman Rockwell mugs, the Kinkade prints.

 

From underneath

a roll of batting and a bolt of chintz

I pull a faded ribbon-festooned box.

Inside, my fairy-stolen baby teeth

and first-shorn locks

acknowledge, in an elegant goodbye,  

that I was once the apple of your eye.

 

 

[© Catherine Chandler, 2026]