Patricia Budd
Mending After My Mother's Death in Winter
It's late March.
Father and I walk,
chat about nothing much,
piddly things, small talk it's called,
word-threads that tie us together.
Thread stitches seams,
sews patches on jeans,
short snippets of yarn knit back up
the ladder of a dropped stitch
saves a sweater for yet another year.
We bring bits of string,
ribbon and thread-ends my mom
kept stuffed in an old coffee can to hang
on twig tips and wild rose thorns so songbirds
might mend their winter-broken nests come spring.
Bio
Patricia Budd, a Navy Brat, grew up reading everything in sight, including lots of Science Fiction. Thus her habit of writing on any scrap of paper handy. She is a retired computer engineer and moved to Maine in 1994, received her MFA from Stonecoast at USM in 2006 at the age of 70. Her poems have been in Anderbo, The MacGuffin, The Maine Review, The Fib Review, Nightingale & Sparrow among other journals and websites.