On the drive back the night I arrived to your new home
with raw London Broil in a pan, I wondered if it’d help you
to learn to listen to your mother if
I remind you gently that you consider your decision
before an incident might end up in a poem.

Or: on account of most depictions of her life
being constructed of lies, I could summon
a story of the ghost of Margaret “Molly” Brown.
Tell you that she uses her spare time in the afterlife
to ensure children like you listen to their mothers.

Margaret spoke different languages but as for
me, I don’t know how fluent I am at bluffing.
So I may stick with a serious look, and
“Honey, this poet got other topics to cover.
Think twice: Don’t inspire me!”

Could backfire. And what do I know? I know
I am a mother of poems. And each one,
I learn. Failures and final drafts.
One thing I learned when I
listened to your mother:

We owe ourselves and others poems.
Poems when we’re good, poems when it’s
hard to cool our tempers, poems when we
can’t concentrate on the words, poems
when we forget our worth, poems when we forget
our body, poems when we forget to hold back
our tongue or our heart, poems
when we’ve never been better. Most of all, we need
poems that remind us how it feels
to do the next best thing.