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Because my son’s at home, sleeping late
on summer’s first weekend, I can drag
myself into unseasonable heat
to jog, having spent a lazy, long
Sunday afternoon doing nothing
but languidly sweating in my seat,
glancing at the tired news, and feeling
likewise exhausted. And because my son’s
spent
the day in bed, alive, unlike his former
classmate, seventeen, whose obituary
I’ve just read, the funeral nearly over
now, the burial hidden from sight by
a wooded ridge, I can speed past his mother
on a white-hot path that rings the cemetery.
*For a 17-year-old classmate of my son who died
the week before vacation started in June.
 She
has a Ph.D. in English from University of Pennsylvania,
and have poems, reviews, and interviews forthcoming
or that have appeared in a variety of American
anthologies and journals, including Poet Lore,
Main Street Rag, Nerve Cowboy, Free Verse, Pivot,
Sonnet Scroll, tPortland Review Literary Journal.
Wendy believes: "It is hard to be a poet,
but I think it is all I can really do with myself.
When I went to college I studied engineering,
but never worked as an engineer. Then I went to
graduate school and got a doctorate in English
so I could teach, but I didn't like teaching,
because I could never write when I taught."
Here is two poems by her about mothers losing
children:
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