The Sand Hill Review               http://www.sandhillreview.org 2006

my mother’s cool hand on my brow

          in comfort

yet to her when they said six months

          and meant it

I gave touch she could not bear

          and a version of the prayer

learned in her childhood

          where she lived for a time

in morphine fog or on the ice mattress

          to cool her fever

as I kept saying to her and she said

          I explained it well

               comforting me

Muriel Karr