Regret
“Anne goes about all day with her head in the clouds.”
How these words of my mother’s mother hurt me
when I read them twelve years after her death
in a letter she’d written to her brother, dead now, too.
I’m shocked by her tone of querulous complaint.
I’d never known she disapproved of me.
Accused, I feel maligned, misunderstood.
Yet wonder, was she wrong, or was she right?
It’s like the sting of a dead bee I once stepped on
in the surf, that I never thought could harm me,
but my toe swelled up red as fire, in astonishing pain,
and I couldn’t walk on it for several days.
In vain I rehearse replies in self-defense,
as if I could respond to her long dead and gone:
“Look how I’ve taken care of myself and others, too;
Look how I’ve lived within my means, and I’ve survived.”
But I’ve had to change myself to be this way.
I feel the hollow ache of a queer regret
for what I’ve had to lose as I’ve grown older,
and that I couldn’t tell her, that she couldn’t see.