My mother lived a short, uneasy life.
Too often startled from her fondest dreams
To do her grudging duties as a wife,
She learned that is gives place always to seems.
Hope’s too frail to build a life upon,
But loneliness endures day after day.
In places never brightened by the sun,
Despair is never very far away.
Her heart was broken twice, first by a man,
And later by a sense of being lost
On a journey she was not allowed to plan,
But had to take, no matter what the cost
To memory, to love, and to desire,
Until the dreary days put out her fire.