My Mother's Mirror Poem by Pamela Ascroft

My Mother's Mirror

It does not do to rail and flail and fight and bite and gnash with teeth and tear with
Claws of word and gesture against the tide of chance and change,
She said with her coffee tilted and cinnamon oatmeal gently fragrant and congealing.

Blood thirsty and terrible, the tempest in my Earl Grey teapot replied,
Kick and scream and beat and turn crimson the white table cloths of they who say!
Say we who say not.
Dappled with puce, blotched with the mark of the righteous, my shaking hand brings
The comfort of my foremothers to my lips-it smokes of lemon and Bergamot and I wait.

Change is but life and life is a synonym for change.
Oaty fragments cling like desperate climbers to mountainous sheer face then slide sadly down the carapace of her blouse.
Serenely she smiles and sips the clouded coffee-patient, expectant,
Eyes English verdant summer green, skin dusted with the gold of some long ago black Irish ancestor.

In the dawn mirror, vapor-hazed with memory of milky mornings,
She counsels the daughter tearing greying hair in a greying life-
Change is but life and life is a synonym for change.

Still water, reflect. Know. Be.
Life, ever mobile, ever malleable, ever twisting and wrenching
Will go on. Will prevail.
Will not be the picture on the wall, the painter's illusion.
Will be the inevitable, unfathomable choices of the puzzle maker,
Of the delicately carved face with eyes of English verdant summer green
Peering blearily into the other side of the mirror.