I offer you this near winter's end--
my mother's voice and shooting stars.

In childhood I knew each one falling
meant a soul in pain, or that the dead,
tired of being dead had come spilling
from the skies to astonish some living thing.

I offer you virginia creeper filled with sunlight
at a railway station; a wind from the sea
blowing around her and my mother entering
a train, carrying nothing.

I cannot sleep. My mind pictures a dusty road,
my mother walking beside me, singing,
then taking me home, turning on the light.
I offer you the night filled with yearning

and my mother's cry: "Look, look up, a shooting star!"