I clasped the urn that bore my mother’s ashes—
solid, heavier than expected—held her fast.
She hadn’t wanted to be scattered—outcast.
But we had no burial plot for her last passage.
My parents’ marriage could be called wed-
locked. As a child I saw their mutual dread,
mutually barred, a trapped, repetitive tread.
I asked my father, “Where will we bury her?”
He (softly): “She’d want to be with her mother,
in the same grave.” His words linger
after years. She never loved him, she said.
Their converse was agony to hear. Fetid:
the place where their relationship settled,
she, always making him wrong; he, silent.
When she died they had been living apart
two decades, after three together. Spent.
Divorce was too expensive. Ashes.
Something about his words and it rushes
through me that he’d loved her to the last.
The burial: austere, like a plotless ballet.
No—name it Hand-to-Hand, she, needy,
nestled at her mother’s breast to feed.
He, finally, beginning to see.
Johanna Caton, O.S.B., is a Benedictine nun of Minster Abbey in Kent, England. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of publications, including: St Austin Review, Fare Forward, One Art, First Literary Review East, Christian Century, Amethyst Review and Catholic Poetry Room. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee.