Readwritepoem #80

Belief

My belief has worn thin. All those years
I sat in church, watched you in your Sunday hat
sitting at the old harmonium, your feet pumping life
into the hymns. Some days now the existence of God
seems ridiculous. Almost as impossible as the idea
that there is nothing pumping the machinery
of this beautiful marvellous world. Do you know
that I am telling you this? It is hard to imagine you
somewhere above, ominiscient.
Or is this one of time's many rooms
that you cannot enter?

After you were gone, I wore your nightgown
until it was so thin it was almost transparent.
I didn't want to let it go.
How long until belief tears apart?


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The prompt at Readwritepoem this week was "What I could never tell my mother".
I could always tell my mother pretty much anything, and the things I wouldn't tell her mostly fall into the category of "too much information" and are certainly not material for poems, especially not poems posted in a public forum. I realised though that I could read the prompt differently. My mother died when I was quite young, expecting my first child. There have been many things I would have liked to tell her, or ask her, and she wasn't there. I started brainstorming a list of ordinary everyday things, intending to use them in a list poem, but somewhere along the line it took a slightly different turn.

As always it is a very rough draft.

For more poems about mothers, secrets, or other things, visit readwritepoem here.