My Mother The Snow In Other Lands Poem by Emmanuel George Cefai

My mother.
The snow in other lands congealed
And in our country blew the unkind
Winds
And blizzard small for a Mediterranean land:
Yes, my mother
The time you in the hospital bed
Lay.
I remember.
I remember your face was not white
And strong your voice resounded
Clear the mind bent with ageing years
But more and more bent with
Treacherous and vindictive hands.
But it was winter, yet
Yet
And the fresh wind of Spring
Loved you too much to let you go
But ah! cruel Winter nails determined
Were to set you down and set.
And in my Poet Seer’s prerogative
See I treacherous and murderous hands
Throttle your life: they were
Winter hands, chill, frost and red.
And at last midst the cries for
The last mercy
That spirit indomitable
At last spoke not
At last said not a word
No, not a word.
Your seeing another Spring was over
And lay
Your head and your face now not
Red and flushed in blood but
Growing white
Yet beautiful
Beautiful on the bed and
Cried I ‘Mother!
Mother speak! ’
And you spoke not, nor moved
But your face only spoke
And still was beautiful as in your
Younger years when flushed
In blood spoke the spirit indomitable.
How white and grey yet beautiful
Your hair, your last hair that grew!
How many tales
How many sufferings each hair
Spoke in its mute silence funereal:
I saw you, I saw you, mother.
And Spring mourned for you
For it was not so afar
No not a month away
Yet cruel Winter made you away
Stole you from the Spring that
Would have given red again
And flush of life in your pale face
That now speaks not. In vain
‘Mother! My mother speak! ’
I cry and weep and then
Fall silent
In that reverent place of sacredness
Where you lay mute and silent:
In vain
In vain
In vain.
What followed then is in my dreams
My dream of life when
Before
I dreamt not the dream of horror:
No, no, away! The bier entering
The church, I at the church-door
Trembling on my feet
Then following:
The Mass, and then
The last traveling down
Of the bier to the hearse,
The driving to the cemetery,
The cool wind, the rain-threatening
Clouds:

The shock, the cry, when open
Yet for once, a last once
The coffin lid and I
Saw not the face
That was flushed in red
But yellow-pale, devoid
Of flush of blood
And
Of the spirit indomitable:
And then
Came the first even
That you lay under the cold stones
In sad Addolorata:
There was a bird that stood
All night silent and mute
Braving the chill and when
The first white lines of Dawn
Lit by degrees the heavens slow
Then the bird on the cold stones
Flew down:
There
There for minutes it stood
Then flew into the skies
The immense skies to disappear
There.
And that was all for then.
But now the pain remains:
The nights of sweat and pain
Are there
Have not decreased:
Yet in that pain there be a
Strange sweet pain in it:
And here I am
In that strange sweet pain
Where days and weeks and
Months and later
Years will into the open cave
Of Life the rock of old oblivion
Roll.
Then will centuries past now
There will a pilgrim gray and old
A Shroud and bent a Ghost
Will come
And by the cold stones where you
Lie
That is your fragment-bones
Rest from his travels and
There
Stretch him too above those stones
And in his hand will hold
A manuscript typed of Immortality:
And resting still his hand will
Let
The manuscript fall by him:
The pilgrim gray, the Shroud,
The Ghost, the Son that came from
Foreign lands.