for my mother
Because you are the morning song,
I sing dawn into the sleepy room.
Because you are a prayer,
I have psalms for hands, vespers for feet,
and there is holiness in the spatula,
devotion in the chair,
faith in sirens, in old vases.
If there are cranberries in my thoughts,
it is because you are the sugar
that taught them not to be afraid
of their own sharpness.
And the white and red petunias
that flutter inside my hope
are there because you planted them
decades ago.
I didn’t know all these years
that I was being made—
but because you are the abacus
I am the calculus of possibility.
Because you are the basket
I’ve learned to weave.