Thesis-Antithesis Poem by Doug Lane

My beloved shrink,
now dead herself,
once told me
it might be helpful
to think of my late
Republican mother

as someone
up in the clouds
who now understands
everything
and forgives everything
and can love me
for what I am
even if I can't.

That was a helpful
thought
but it also generated
the counter thought
that my mother
might now be down below,
not up in the clouds,

and that her thinking
in hell
might have hardened
and narrowed
as she devolved,
posthumously,
from a Reagan Republican
to a Trumplican,

and that she judges me
more harshly
than she ever did
in life
and is more profoundly
disappointed in me.

And, of course,
understands absolutely
nothing about me,
can no longer even remember
the good times
we had
when I was a kid,
baking chocolate chip cookies together,
laughing,
and eating the batter.

And that she now wishes
I were someone else
entirely,
someone akin to Barr,
or Mnuchin, or Wilbur Ross, or Pompeo,
or Trump himself,
and it makes her sick
to think about me.

And then I find
a synthesis
between these
thesis-antithesis moms,
a mom
in purgatory

torn between love and hate,
wisdom and folly,
fear and understanding,
darkness and light,
despair and faith,

in an eternal waiting room
in a Greyhound bus station,
hoping her son
down on Earth
will hurry up
and pay the indulgences,
buy the ticket,
which will
get her the hell
out of there
and back on the road
to love.