The Poem My Mother Recited at My Graduation
She'd written it the night before. On the back of a receipt.
My mother came to my graduation and she read a poem. She had written it the night before, on the back of a grocery receipt, the kind of paper that is too thin to be a poem and too important to be thrown away.
The poem was about the way I had grown up, the way I had become the person I was, the way the years had changed me from a child into a man. It was about the specific way I had walked across the stage, the way the gown had looked, the way the cap had sat on my head.
She read it to a room of people who had watched me grow up, aunts and uncles and cousins and friends who had known me since I was a child. When she finished there was a silence that was not empty. It was full of the thing the poem had said, the thing that everyone in the room knew but nobody had ever said out loud.
I keep the receipt now, framed, next to the diploma. The diploma is the proof that I graduated. The receipt is the proof that my mother was proud.
She wrote it on the back of a receipt because that is where she wrote everything, on the backs of things, the grocery lists and the receipts and the envelopes that were too thin to be a poem and too important to be thrown away. The poem is the thing that was worth writing down, even if it was written on the back of a grocery list.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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