Evening News
Mother spent the last years throwing
out family objects. You’ll have less to
suffer over when the time for suffering
comes, she says like she’s describing
the good sense of cleaning your pots
and pans while cooking. When I visit
we wash and dry the dishes after dinner
then drink tea on the couch, feet sharing
the tiny table her father made she found
when they emptied out her childhood
home in 1977. Her parents were dead
before she turned thirty. You never get
to know them as adults, she says and still
calls them Mumma and Daddy. Now
she says things like, Area rugs are the
bane of the elderly. She says, I love you,
to her old friend when she calls to say
her husband has decided to drink
the juice the doctor gave that will put
him to sleep for good. I am a stranger
to her life of friends falling in the living
room, fracturing femurs; friends who
can’t remember their meds or take a
deep breath; friends calling it quits,
who can’t do it even one more day.
*
Jeff McRae lives in Vermont and is a general news reporter for Vermont News and Media. His collection, The Kingdom Where No One Dies, published by Pulley Press, is a finalist for the Vermont Book Award for poetry.
From The Archives: Published on This Day
- Cruel Spring by Tamara Madison (2025)
- Senryu by John Arthur (2025)
- Two Poems by Ellen Rowland (2024)
- What We Hold Onto by Eileen Moeller (2024)
- Tapestry by Bracha K. Sharp (2023)
So true. Great poem.
My sister just fell in the living room. I understand what it means not to be able to do it one more day, a feeling well captured by the poem.