Last Leaves

These last leaves between us, Mother
falling from our old family tree
your last few clinging in your winter
mine, yet coloured in my autumn days they do their best to carpet our lands
but Time's wind blows left and right
and even these will be lost some day
though I gather, gather them all up
to preserve some fragment of our life
I have some of your earliest, when
your hand, always beautiful, wrote
earnest lines of fated love to father
in those days that were before me
before any of those he left behind
and I have seen these lines fade
and your hand shake with the decades
like a dancer, spent, and finished
giving over to those more nimble
I rake them up into a great pile
higher than the lives they colour
and when your last one falls, when
I have read those final lines, I
want to see you run like a girl
and jump into that great pile where
you will always live and live forever