Violet

• Lily Arbuckle, Grade 12
• Poetry
• 2020

i remember my mother; her shaky straw hats and flimsy white dresses made of the sea
and benign sky

well-trodden soles ambled the length of Gilbert Jetty

i did not know shoulders could be so sharp, nor elbows; so freckled, bronzed in the fading light

my mother’s raspy joints - children clambering across
her body: me and agnes and bailey and maxine! and drew (he too young to remember)

i remember tall glasses of lemonade sweating on the verandah, cold to the core

there were echoes of the beauty she had once been (deep blue eyes, a face of perfect symmetry)
but she was too thin, and looked unclean

oft-times, my mother compared happiness to snowflakes: an act of possession which instantly gives way
to nothing