As your birthday approaches, Mother,
I should pause and thank you
for your bequest of grace, a gift you
left me on you passing ten years before
I found you, found myself again.
It was more than the helical part of me
that finally became apparent, more
than a heritage imagined but unknown.
It was something as simple as
a college yearbook picture, for you
will always be the young lady smiling
into the camera, forever twenty, never
aging, and that allows me to imagine
that I still have some of my youth,
and that is a gift I can take to my grave.