My mother wrote a poem on her deathbed
after five bleak months of leukemia.
Something in Arabic to the effect of, Why me?
My father persuaded her to throw it out.
He thought people would have found it
self-pitying. He was probably right.
The poem is lost to me forever,
and though I suspect it wasn’t great,
I’d have liked to read it nonetheless.
It would have been handwritten
in her crimped cursive, more distinctive
in my memory than her voice,
letting me glean an impression of her despair
I could cushion in the riverbed of my grief,
like the tattoo of her name on my forearm
stylized in Quranic embellishments,
calligraphic curlicues and flicks,
a way to say to myself, Why me?