My Mother's Diary: "Who Am I?"

"Let's go for a walk"

Hello, Poetry Friend

My journey into poetry began when my mother’s cancer reappeared in 2007, after it began in 1981. This time she would not pull through, and I poemed my way through her last three years, writing 72 poems. I’ve said that my first book, The Joy of Poetry, is about losing my mom and finding poetry. It’s also about finding myself.

With each passing year I feel more like I’ve refound my mother within myself, as if a sliver of her dwells inside. As if I am a horcrux.

That sort of spiral requires a sestina.

“A sestina is a form poem that repeats the same six words, in a rolling fashion, at the end of the lines. Sestinas are good for questions, mysteries, or escher-drawing-like experiences in which the proverbial stairs simultaneously go both up and down. Unlike most of my poems about my mother, which I worked and reworked right up until publication, this one came out whole and remains unchanged.”

–The Joy of Poetry

I don’t love the title to my poem, below. I wish I’d been a bit more clever or nuanced. But that wasn’t how I was feeling when I wrote it. I wrote into the question, so the question gets to stay.

Who Am I?
     also published in The Joy of Poetry

“Let’s go for a walk,”
she’d say, and then my mother
would circle the block. I’d question
why we couldn’t go farther. My body
could handle it. But Merry
Nell’s couldn’t. She needed a horcrux

or, perhaps, more than one horcrux.
To figure that out, she’d need a longer walk
through the neighborhood. She’d be merry,
as she always was. I am a mother
who likes to push her body.
There’s no question

about it. But every day I question
why I am her horcrux.
Why everybody seems to think that I am walking her
walk,
that I am mothering like my mother.
It’s true. My name is also Merry,

and I also chose to marry
at 21. That is not the question.
I need to know how to mother
without one. All I have is a horcrux,
one I bring with me each morning I take a walk:
my own body.

But it’s acting strangely, my body.
It’s giving me signs, as yours did, Merry
Nell. Oh, it still can walk
up actual mountains. But I do question
because it doesn’t feel like mine. It feels like a horcrux.
I feel like I am you, my dear, dead mother.

And I’m not, am I? Holy Mary, mother
of God. Pray. You’re not here in body.
Neither is my mom. She’s only a horcrux.
She wasn’t into you, Mary. She didn’t even have a question
about you. Not even when she couldn’t walk.

Like Harry, I am the horcrux. I am not my mother.
I can still walk, and I still dwell in this body.
But I am Merry Megan. No question.

—(Merry) Megan Willome

Happy poeming!

Megan