The point of a moonbeam, dearest child,”   said my mother

“Is a sign to heaven the young alone may follow

And adults never find.”

                                     “Don’t grown-ups go there ever?”

I asked as I reclined at her side on a pillow

Voluptuously drowning, drowsy fingers clutching

At straws of her hair.  “I thought only old people died?”

“They do;” she replied.  “But the way is found by touching –

And the texture of light is lost to an older mind.”

 

Persisting, warm in the glow of her skin by lamplight

And eye-wide in the white-bright fronds of the slivered moon:

“Will I go somewhere full of old people?”  I asked her,

“And follow a shivery moonbeam – why?”        

                                                               “Some are called,”

She responded, a mystic gleam in her saddened eye.

“I wouldn’t answer!”  Said I.

                                             “Sleep now, child.”  The light was

Extinguished as I burrowed deep in the chasms of bed.

Flowing words in the warm like a dream to enclose me.

“Here.   This is Heaven for me.”  I said.

                                                             “Perhaps for you.”

From an outer world her cold voice clattered like pebbles.

“Why is my Heaven always tomorrow?”  She wondered.

I lay still in the hollow where my father once slept.

Tomorrow?   Would he come, then, tomorrow?  We pondered

The unasked question. 

                                     “No, nor ever.”   My mother said.