There.  We’ve broken the back of winter,
my mother used to say on February first,
standing above the sink, knocking
coffee grounds out of the basket, pale
blue eyes taking in the frozen landscape.
And there was no impatience in her saying it,
as if settling into some entre-season of waiting,
that was as it should be. 

Then she’d turn and fill our glasses
with startling orange.  Maybe pleased
with the brightness she made, maybe
oblivious to it, thinking about laundry
or bills coming due.  There was so much
you couldn’t know. 

Never wish time away, she also said.
And you could see cloud-shadows
of insurgent losses scuttle across her face,
then drift off slowly into the wallpaper,
as she set herself to marking students’ papers,
answering mail or patching up
the weather-stripping on the door. 

Was she waiting for better days?
For something good to come along?
For us to grow up and finally become, please God
at last, half-pleasant human beings?  And who
could wait that long? 

Nor could we ever grasp—or be expected to,
what force of will or love
kept her enduring there with us—mute
and inward-looking at our still-fresh lives,
waiting for slices of toast to spring—
impatient even for that.

Marcia F. Brown of Cape Elizabeth, ME, is the author of Home to Roost, Paintings and Poems from Belfast, Maine, published in 2007, and The Way Women Walk (2006), selected first prize winner in the Sheltering Pines Press Chapbook Competition. Her poems and reviews have appeared numerous regional and national journals.  She is a graduate of the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA Program.