A Dream About My Mother

by Cynthia Bernard


My mother is a barren field that somehow managed to have children.

                I am in the passenger seat.

Some mothers give birth, then take, take, take.

                My mother is behind the wheel.

Some mothers fall into tar pits of depression and linger there.

                The car is moving as if it’s having a seizure, jerking and weaving.
                Accelerating.

Some mothers are furious volcanoes; some mothers are distant ice-storms.

                There are children playing in the road.
                Balls, jump ropes, a plastic bat.

Some mothers make very small lives and then live them.

                She is holding up a newspaper in front of her face.

Some mothers tell many lies, new lies that fail to cover old lies.

                Her feet press the pedals at random. She is laughing.

I have had each of these mothers, sometimes.
Other times, none.

                I am trying to steer. So many children!

Now my mother has aged into a repulsive kind of old—
sits and complains, eats junk, grows ever more obese
on sugar-coated untruths about the past.

                I can’t reach the brakes.

She’s almost dead, having never really lived.

                Am I doomed to live this way forever?


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"A Dream About My Mother" was originally published in Heimat Review.

Cynthia Bernard is a woman approaching her seventies who is finding her voice as a poet after many years of silence. A long-time classroom teacher and a spiritual mentor, she lives and writes on a hill overlooking the ocean, about 25 miles south of San Francisco.