Poem for my mother

Lucy Dougan

Poem for my mother

 
 
It is you who makes me lovely. You have bequeathed me loveliness in numerous small parcels. It is you who makes me save the flowers and love the gown everyone else would throw away. Yet you never wanted things. You always said here, have it. You were just a girl waiting for the easterlies to crackle across the paddocks who met a boy who kept crickets in cages. And you were also always very old. You asked it is OK in the end if I come for you? How could I say no?
 
 
 
 

Lucy Dougan is a widely published and prize-winning poet. Her books include Memory Shell (5 Islands Press), White Clay (Giramondo), Meanderthals (Web del Sol), and The Guardians (Giramondo), which won the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for poetry. With Tim Dolin, she is co-editor of The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky (UWAP, 2017). She works for the China Australia Writing Centre at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia.