Marion

Mother died today.

She is singing in the marsh-rushes and

skating the lake in ghostly wisps of white mist.

She is coalescing on the leaves in crystal

droplets of morning-dew.

She flocks at the bank in rushes of

pale feathers and soft gray earth, a flurry

of the morning cold in her breath like

a tale that has no words, that I cannot hear, only feel.

Her limbs are like the weeping boughs of

willows as she dances in her grave of gold,

graceful like the needle that pricks silk, that

folds cloth by its petals and weaves tears of home

into sunbonnets and quilts, that skirts like the mayfly

on the rivershore’s wet stones, that stings and sings

and dies.

From “The Stranger,” by Albert Camus, 1942.