! The Beloved Stranger Poem by Michael Shepherd

It was about seven years
after her breakdown
which she could not remember, and
which I could not forget
that one day
as I was creaming and powdering her
more intimately than I ever expected to as a man to his mother,
she turned to me and said -
inching her way
with supreme heroic human effort
out of the black and midnight subsoil maze
of dementia - said
carefully, enquiringly
as if to establish a relevant fact,

'Are we related? '

And I knew not how to answer...

Then after some few days
I found a way to ease that pain:
as I creamed and powdered
the soreness under her still fine womanly breasts
at a hundred and two years of age
I said quietly
to her uncomprehending memory,
'beloved stranger...'

it wasn't a joke that she could share, but
it helped a little.