Memento Mori: Mother, After My Treatment by Jennifer Franklin

When she returns to her garden, it fills her with sorrow.
She didn’t know it would become wild so soon. She saw
she might never coax back its ruined form. Only the animals
scavenging for bulbs seemed familiar. How quickly the earth forgets—
how fast one can fade from the world. A branch of Rose-of-Sharon blooms
above the hosta—top-heavy, improbable. Weeds overtake each bed
and the Japanese lanterns, her neighbor’s dead mother once planted,
creep under the fence and spread like disease.

In the city, as she changed my trach dressing, something washed away
with my wound. She is unfamiliar to herself now, weeding potted plants
on her patio. She’s not at home in her house, too large for the first time,
nor in my small apartment where we share a bed. Her flowers never looked
this ugly. Only the daylilies bloom the way she remembers them. Their orange faces
promise it’s not too late to salvage something before the summer’s gone.

Jennifer Franklin is the author of No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018). Her poetry has appeared in Blackbird, Boston Review, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, The Nation, Paris Review,“poem-a-day” on poets.org, and Prairie Schooner. She lives in NYC, is co-editor of SHP, and teaches manuscript revision at HVWC, where she serves as Program Director.