May Days
Revised
In my cupboard I keep a milk‑white vase my mother once filled with lilies‑of‑the‑valley. Soundless little bells trembling, nodding in shy display amid the glad green of spring. Memories of that tribute return every year — immediate as their perfume. In time my mother’s memory faded — bowing, browning as their season ended. I tried to reach her buried thoughts with a bouquet from my own garden. She held them close, grasping for reassurance and forgotten words. The seasons gallop now with grief and grace, a slow forgetting blooming in me. I take down the vase, gather sweet notes of spring — a gift for my own daughter.
This is a very beautiful poem, Nora. I was very touched by it, thinking of my own mother who grew her own flowers and put them in a big white vase. Actually, now that I think about it, money was scarce back then, so shops rarely sold them, like they do now.
There is a passage where what is passed down does not remain as memory, but moves as a gesture, continuing to bloom without needing to be remembered in the same way. It is not loss that interrupts, but the way something travels through time by changing form, and right there, where memory softens, what remains finds another way to continue.