The Ladies Who Lunch Alone

May.  Mothers Day.
Delivering bouquets of flowers
to villages, hamlets and rural houses

where elderly women wrapped in heavy sweaters,
memories of love and well-repressed resentment,

sit alone with their walkers, canes and crutches
in formerly, well-loved Victorian houses

seedy, in need of repair,
surrounded by once-meticulous gardens
now choked with weeds grown through layers of leaves,
sorrowful, silent, forgotten.

These women are too frail
to carry the vases
of flowers from children
who are all but erased
from their daily lives
and consigned to a place
that exists only behind eyes
set deep in soft, sad faces:

toddlers waddling through spring beds
bursting with daffodils and tulips,
grape hyacinths, lush pink peonies,
how long has it been since...

Mother laughed tenderly tending
both toddlers and flowers,
and Father touched up the house paint
now so genteely tawdry

like the lives walled inside
trapped in infirmity alone,
anticipating release
from that once haven home

to which long-ago toddlers
send pale representative bouquets
as a ritual remembrance
of those mist-distant May days

which rate only the token
of long distance love in a vase
of cut, dead flowers
and a phone call to a faded

weed-overgrown
Eden of Memory.