I knelt with my mother at the side of the bed every night.
Now I lay me down to sleep, we prayed together,
I pray the lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take.
Meant to assure, comfort, after all,
In the rhythm of those words, my mother’s gentle voice
her kneeling self-beside me,
but all I remember was the dread.
If I should die?
Days later, I lay on my back in early summer
The warm concrete lulled.
Tired after running around with my toddler siblings,
we wandered to different corners of the yard.
Dad whirred the grass with an old rotary mower.
Mom rested in the house. The air buzzed with bees.
The clover smelled sweet. Clouds filled the sky
I watched a movie of passing horses,
rabbits, babies, shifting, fading, moving lightly across the sky.
At some point one cloud became a very large hand.
Open -palmed, thumb and 4 fingers spread wide
I knew the hand was waving at me.
Sure it must be God’s hand gesturing happy greeting,
I felt the welcome and simply knew all was and would be well.
Rather than sit up to call for my family to come see, I lay still,
let my whole-body fill with another kind of warmth
a contented secret I’d never tell.
As the cloud became the trailing hair of a woman,
Mom called us in for supper.
Early Morning Poems 