Ten Years
By Karen Petersen
Ten years after my father's death
my mother looks at his photo
and says she cannot
even remember his voice.
She's forgotten--or is it pain?--
the strange depths of their last
ten years together: the light
and the dark.
So it is I, the umbilical thread,
that holds it all together now;
the frayed, fraying, gossamer fineness
of memory, my only inheritance.
See? I am the keeper, I am the tomb.
*
Karen Petersen has traveled the world extensively, publishing both nationally and internationally in a variety of publications. Most recently, she was published in The Manzano Mountain Review and Pilgrimage Magazine in the USA, Antiphon in the UK, Wild Words in Germany and A New Ulster in Northern Ireland. In 2015, she read "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" at the Yeats Festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the KGB Bar in NYC. Her poems have been translated into Persian and Spanish. She holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Classics from Vassar College and an M.S. from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.