EPIC

EPIC
(FOR MY MOTHER)

When they laid your ashes deep in the cold ground,
I felt the loss of an epic love reverberating all around.

In life you were my Iliad, my keenly treasured Odyssey.
When I lost you, I lost Paradise and drowned in the briny deep.

Our love was on the grandest scale,
Like Herman Melville’s great white whale.
You were the mother who set the bar that others would aspire to,
And sinking slow in the Inferno was all that I could do.

In years to come I will sing for you a fitting elegy,
But right now all that I can do is sift through years of memories,
And celebrate your life through the glass darkly.

For you were my personal Gone With The Wind,
My Ben Hur and my Ten Commandments.
I am numb to the cost of all I have lost,
In the wake of your final passing.

Like my personal Holocaust or my private 9-11,
The sun has toppled from the sky.
A tragedy unspeakable, that leaves this witness high and dry.

I loved you in the classic way, I hold your spirit dear,
Like the Hawthorne and the Faulkner tomes,
The Chaucer and the Shakespeare.

A gentle parent, dearest friend, confidante from birth,
The finest woman in my eyes who ever walked the earth.

In life you were my Hemingway, my Romeo and Juliet,
My Odyssey, my Iliad, my Hamlet and Macbeth.
And when they laid your ashes deep in the cold, cold ground,
I felt the loss of an epic love, reverberating all around.

-Bruce Potts
Copyright 2008
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED