American life in poetry

Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of poems have been written to express the grief of losing a parent. Many of the most telling of these attach the sense of loss to some object, some personal thing left behind, as in this elegy to her mother by a Nebraskan, Karma Larsen:

Moonflowers

Milly Sorensen, Jan. 16, 1922-Feb. 19, 2004

It was the moonflowers that surprised us.

Early summer we noticed the soft gray foliage.

She asked for seedpods every year but I never saw them in her garden.

Never knew what she did with them.

Exotic and tropical, not like her other flowers.

I expected her to throw them in the pasture maybe,

a gift to the coyotes. Huge, platterlike white flowers

shining in the night to soften their plaintive howling.

A sound I love; a reminder, even on the darkest night,

that manicured lawns don’t surround me.

Midsummer they shot up, filled the small place by the back door,

sprawled over sidewalks, refused to be ignored.

Gaudy and awkward by day,

by night they were huge, soft, luminous.

Only this year, this year of her death

did they break free of their huge, prickly husks

and brighten the darkness she left.