Kamaria S Muntu

My mother on her honeymoon with my father at Niagara Falls🥰

Love’s Last Invocation
for my Mother

By Kamaria Muntu

Love’s last invocation
in my language, in my tongue
to tribute
to want
to believe
to lose
the flesh of trailing roses
and tilted flasks of wine
anointing like the sweetest oils
for succour, for sleep

To lose you again
to turn, and turn and turn
this dust to a lucid shining

A wish deferred; a wish retrieved
by lone and recurrent memory
fractal topaz pictures soft to the touch
in tandem with sores
lament of carceral fire
called to God’s cooling soil

May you consciously rise
and see in the after-grow
in the grace
for the end is but muted repose
quiet now
no one speak

except for the little girl
waiting at the window
for her mommy to come home