Within fifteen minutes of waking, a poem had fully formed in my head:

After my grandmother died,
my mother told me of a dream
she had from time to time

In my mother’s dream,
my grandmother was alive
There’d been a mistake
She hadn’t died

It was a great relief, my mother said,
and her dream was filled with joy.
But when she awoke,
it was like losing her mother all over again.

I haven’t had that dream
I long for it

To discover that there was a mistake
that my mother is not dead
To see her again
to enjoy her company and conversation
her gentle and kind ways
her smile

I would gladly pay the price
of the pain of waking up and losing her

To be with her again, if only in a dream.

I believe in revision, and this poem has not been revised. I will revise it, over the next weeks and months and it will become a better poem.

But I had to post it today because today is my mother’s birthday.