PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Six and ten and twenty and another ten, the years gather in groups rounding out to sixty,

then seventy, and we wonder and wander down chains of thoughts to the one about your mother

going to Majorca in a plane with a blindfolded Don Quixote,

drinking sixties’ cocktails on the hotel’s veranda.

I always picture an 8-millimeter movie projector version, because that’s what she showed us,

of happy smiling wives, on holiday.

She talks of the trip. Your mother talks of the trip so often you forget you weren’t there,

and she tells the joke of the blindfolded Don Quixote as the Iberian Airlines’ logo, there

on the tail of the plane that took her there, to the island of Majorca,

which you find out recently is also called Mallorca and is an island in the Mediterranean.

You thought it somewhere off the coast of Spain, just off the coast in the grey Atlantic, not in the middle of an aqua colored sea.

The chain of thinking and thoughts roll down like leaking water on metal links to a perch high above the swirling sea as a cliff diver swan sails out and over the rocks to dive straight into the waves at the base.                                    

And all the 8-millimeter film crumbling in cans in the closet,

and the guilt at not being the curator of your past as you should be,

and lament and repent to not repeat the sin of forgetfulness in caring for your past

as those around say, stop looking in the past, only bring forth and forward those things you want in your future.

I want my mother's joy, and the black and white memory of the white two-piece shorts outfit she wore with her sunglasses and martini on the veranda of that cliff hugging Majorcan hotel,  her head clothed in a scarf against the wind and sun, tied under her chin like scarves are designed to be worn, not wrapped up like Rosie the Riveter or a heavy metal rocker tongue out and scaring the camera.

Cheers, she clinks the stemmed glass to the camera and laughs.