Elegy, Surrounded by Seven Trees • National Poetry Month

Elegy, Surrounded by Seven Trees

for Michele Antoinette Pray-Griffiths


Ordinary days deliver joy easily 
again & I can’t take it. If I could tell you 
how her eyes laughed or describe 
the rage of her suffering, I must 
admit that lately my memories 
are sometimes like a color 
warping in my blue mind. 
Metal abandoned in rain. 

My mother will not move. 

Which is to say that 
sometimes the true color of 
her casket jumps from my head 
like something burnt down 
in the genesis of a struck flame. 
Which is to say that I miss
the mind I had when I had
my mother. I own what is yet. 
Which means I am already
holding my own absence 
in faith. I still carry a faded slip of paper 
where she once wrote a word 
with a pencil & crossed it out. 

From tree to tree, around her grave
I have walked, & turned back 
if only to remind myself 
that there are some kinds of 
peace, which will not be 
moved. How awful to have such 
wonder. The final way wonder itself 
opened beneath my mother’s face 
at the last moment. As if she was 
a small girl kneeling in a puddle 
& looking at her face for the first time, 
her fingers gripping the loud, 
wet rim of the universe. 


by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
courtesy poets.org