My mother tells me it was good

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My mother tells me it was good

Out of the spine of the piano my mother

is calling, and for the first time her voice to me

is jazz. Through my headphones

and a black man’s touch on the keys and strings

I hear her -- the tingles and flashes, rolls, sparks

and hints that used to fill the white church

under the shadow of the cross, telling me

There is more to piano music than "Jesus Saves"

and more to my mother than what I know.

In crystalline notes of his, I recognize her timed pause,

a drop from an icicle melting in the sun

that falls the moment just after you know you want it.

In duet, a saxophone’s smoke rises to the sun,

helping it warm my mother’s piano confessions to me

drop by drop -- those revelations I envisioned, prayers

she breathed in a jazz club before she found God,

suspended, frozen in the veil of her past, yet whispered

through chinks -- in winks and inklings to me

on the black and white hymned keys for the someday, this day,

when I feel their beating hum in the melting icicle of my spine.

~ Ruth M.

Hear a podcast of this poem here.

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