Volume 27 - Number 2 - Winter 2021
Pages: 149 - 271
Mintz, J. (2021). Watching my mother sleep [Poem]. Clio’s Psyche, 27(2), 193
Watching My Mother Sleep
caregiving, death, Inna Rozentsvit, mother-daughter relationship, mourning, poem, psychobiography, psychohistory
Glimpse by glimpse,
I see how her body seems
to have slowed,
her gait more
graceless as she climbs upstairs
to unmake her sickbed,
no longer the diplomat’s wife
under the thumb of Father.
I don’t know how I will ever give
her up to death the way
a lighthouse lets a boat drift out
of its sight,
or the clapping wings of a gull
fade into darkness.
Sometimes I sit next to her
just to hear her labored breaths
wash up to the shoreline of sleep,
as if to reassure myself
that these waves will never
start to cease.
Page 193
How to cite this article
Mintz, J. (2021). Watching my mother sleep [Poem]. Clio’s Psyche, 27(2), 193
