David Bowden

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My Mothers Light

I am ten years old
overalls and jelly shoes
and I watch as my mother replaces the lights in our garden with 10 small solar laterns.
Stretched on my tip-toes helping her hang them, she tells me of their magic
How they capture searing beams of light from the sun
Singeing their insides for the sake of
lighting our darkest summer nights.
I am ten years old
And I already know how hard it is for my mother to keep all that light inside of her

I am fifteen years old
And my mother's lanterns are cobwebs and rusted bronze
The magic inside them fading
Worn from years of casting out shadows
Their light once smolder, now feeble, faint.
I am fifteen years old and I cannot remember the last time my mother let herself see the sun
Can't remember her before her light began to flicker
Before she let herself become half mother half ghost
Her silhouette slipping through the cracks in her chest
threatening to return all her light back to the sky


I am twenty two years old when my mother's magic finally falters
When she surrenders her light to the jealous sun
Embers escaping from her wrists like twilight
For years I blamed her for loving the darkness more than me
For not holding on to her light
As tightly as I clung to her shadowed skin
I wish she would have shared her darkness with me
Let me kindle her burning like kindred cinders
No single flame can banish an eternity of night skies

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