The Poetry of Mothers

On a warm July evening in 2023, my cousin Mimma invites me to a poetry reading in the courtyard of the Palazzo Marchesale, the stately 18th Century fortress that was once the home of a wealthy ruling family here.

I am in the town of Pomarico, in southern Italy, to do research for a book on the town where my grandfather was born 140 years ago. This night, I assume, will be something different, softer and perhaps even exquisite, a chance to step away from my usual daily routine, mostly involving Alpha Wolf men in gruff conversations over bottles of beer. 

I do not anticipate the power of the scene that will unfold.

I shake hands with Nicola De Lillo, a regional writer promoting a new poetry collection. The palazzo’s high stone walls create a quiet realm where subtle revelations can be made, secrets told, emotions unearthed.

There are twelve of us, Mimma included, open-minded literature lovers who form a jury of sorts — half men, half women — waiting to bestow our verdict on what we hear, about whether we approve of how the words make us feel. 

We sit in white plastic chairs, encircling a young artist whose gentle eyes project warmth and intellect. Wearing a blue T-shirt, shorts and preppy red sneakers, Nicola looks like he just stepped off a Boston college campus.

The promotional material introduces him as both a physicist and poet. The two words seem incongruent, mismatched. Yet for the next hour, he merges the two concepts with the exacting finesse of a physicist and an artist’s subtle flair. 

His collection, “L’universo in un Bacio,” The Universe in a Kiss, is a slim gut-punch of 120 pages, written in Italian. At one point, Nicola reads aloud: “Il tuo profumo é nei chilometri / lungo la schiena / Devo sentire che ti muovi / come la sabbia con dentro le mani / Che se mollo la presa finisce il mundo.”

“Your scent is in the miles / down your back / I need to feel you move / like sand with your hands in it / That if I let go, the world ends.”

A woman next to me gasps at the passion that pulsates within the words. An hour later, we all line up to buy the book. When I tell Nicola why I have come to Pomarico he signs my copy in English: “To John, for his love for the world.”

Like the others, I want to take his vision home with me. One topic in particular beckons: An event has rocked his young world, recalling a similar loss that still rocks mine. 

The deaths of our mothers.

During the reading Nicola addresses the group in Italian, not my strong suit. Still, to my ear, the string of lilting Italian words alone sounds like its own poetry. I follow along with a smartphone app to translate his spoken voice. 

I try to keep up with the insights tumbling forth. Yet I struggle to keep pace. Many phrases fly past, unfathomed. At one point, Nicola pauses, turns to me and says, “I hope I’m not distracting you.”

I blush. He thinks I’m scrolling the Internet, not listening, not translating. It could not be farther from the truth. I say nothing. Saving me from further torture, he continues on.

*

Nicola was born in the town of Senise, not far from Pomarico. He’s a PhD candidate in astrophysics at the University of Glasgow and his studies involve the detection of cosmic gravitational waves in space.

He ponders his own artistic universe as well. In the introduction to his book he theorizes that we read poetry “to give shape to an emotion, recognize it, and bring it out to fight the malaise we would suffer keeping it locked up.”

How does one pack such stellar achievements into less than 30 years? At his age, I drank too much, chased women I didn’t even like and harbored no such insights about my work or my life, no clue of who I am.

Now I am old enough to be this young poet’s father, on a quest to uncover a long-dormant part of myself. Why didn’t I do this when I was 30? It all feels so humbling.

As Nicola reads, I glance at the faces of the women. For them, it must seem as if he comes from another planet. In Pomarico, they endure the culture of the Alpha Wolf, a world dominated by men. And here is someone young enough to be their son, talking about how to feel. 

One poem plumbs his mother’s impending death, surmising whether he’s learned all he can from her. “Because soon you will leave / and I do not know from who / I can learn love, Mom / Mom, the word / that the universe gave us / to tell us we exist.”

When he finishes, if just for a moment, the courtyard is silent.

Afterwards, we all linger like students at a university class, anxious to make a connection with our instructor. Nicola and I exchange email addresses. I hurry home, anxious to pose more questions. I want to know about the loss of his mother.

*

Like Nicola, I am an orphaned son. I lost my mother when I was 51, working in China as a newspaper foreign correspondent, far from home, far from her.

Word comes after midnight, a time when there is no good news. There’s a bang at my hotel room door. A clerk says I have a call from the U.S. I feel dread.

My father, then 86, suffered from onset dementia. It must be him. My wife was crying on the line. I expected the worst.

“It’s my Dad, right?” I said, flinching.

No,” she responded. “Your Mom.”

Like poetry, the words are powerful. My knees buckled. I collapsed on top of myself, like a Twin Tower. Never had anyone so close to me delivered such terrible news. 

My mother had just turned 80. And then she was gone.

Nicola later shares his notes on our first email exchange, when I first ask about his mother. He sees a opportunity for soul-searching and writes: “I am realizing now he asked that question not for his book, but for me, because it was something I needed to give an answer.”

Nicola writes insightfully, even in his second language. There’s an economy of words as he describes his personal pain. This is how he begins:

“People die. You can’t talk to them anymore. You can’t see them, you can’t touch them, you can’t hear them, you can’t feel them. They go.”

“And sometimes they can go in a few months, weeks or even days.”

“My mother taught me her last lesson: What is death for those who leave?”

“My father taught me about death for those who stay.”

I have learned the same lessons from both of my parents, in precisely the same order.

Nicola’s mother is named Angela. She dies slowly, of cancer.

My mother’s name is Jean. She was killed in a car crash, taken from us in the time it takes to draw a single breath.

Nicola was on death watch.

How else to say it? His mother had been placed in hospice care. He was sharing shifts with his father. The middle of the night was the son’s time. 

The graveyard hour.

“It is around 2 am, I know she is passing away,” he wrote. “That morning, the doctors told me there was nothing to do anymore.”

Nothing to do but wait.

“People who die from cancer experience the most brutal suffering, and for her it wasn’t any different,” he continues. “The cancer even decided that the last days of her life she would be blinded.”

How can any of us predict how we will act in our last hours? Will we show grace, or will we submit to the pain? No one judges us either way.

Angela shows her son the meaning of love and faith.

“My mother tells me “Nic, go to sleep please, I am fine,” with the sweetest tenderness she used to show. Even in the worst night of her life.” 

“I just say “Who will hold your hand, mom?’ ”

“And with her typical gesture of scrolling her head when agreeing to carry another load for someone else she replies “Don’t worry, Jesus will hold my hand.’”

Nicola’s mother had grasped a truth about death that he could not yet know.

“I am now sure she knew it before the doctors, before we could figure it out, living her last two months in bed, blind, with atrocious pain and not even complaining about it. Just loving us and being loving and supporting.”

Even as the end nears, Nicola’s mother thought about her son, not herself. He watched her raise a hand to get the attention of each new nurse.

“‘Sorry, can I say something?’ with her now-weak voice,” Nicola wrote.“And then with all the pride a mother can show, she says ‘Did you know that my son here wrote a poetry book?’ Believe me, I was unable to grasp why she would do that. Almost shocked.”

Angela passed away a few days later.

*

After suddenly losing a loved one, people will often say, “I wish I’d had the chance to say goodbye.”

No, you don’t.

Being able to say farewell usually means the person is dying slowly, like Angela, possibly in excruciating pain. When people express that delusion, I say, “Don’t wait. Say goodbye now. Say goodbye every day.”

I don’t get the chance to say goodbye to my mother, not the way I would have liked, when she was still here, still active, still laughing, still in a bowling league.

At the time I didn’t give it a second thought. I assumed she would always be here. I was too busy being me.

*

One day, my father couldn’t remember where he lived. He had just left the grocery store in Ocala, Florida and drove around until something, maybe a tree, or an intersection, triggered his memory.

After that, he gave the car keys to my mother. Now consigned to the passenger seat, he often held on for dear life. He called her Mario Andretti, after the Italian racer driver, and swore that she once made a turn on two wheels.

“Jean, slow down,” he cautioned.

My mother had become his daily caretaker. She balanced the checkbook. She watched over him. She drove him everywhere. She feared the future.

As a reward, my wife and I gifted her a spa treatment. She left us a phone message, saying how much she’d enjoyed herself. “Pampered,” she called it. In heaven. 

On the last morning of her life, she left home alone, hastily, in a hurry to run errands.

“Drive carefully,” my father said to his Mario Andretti.

*

She ran the stop sign. Lost in thought, she missed this one last sign post of her life. Another car going 50 mph plowed into her driver’s side door. It all happened so quickly. I’m sure Nicola can explain the sheer physics of dying in a hail of crushing metal and glass. 

The two vehicles plowed onto a copse of trees off the road. Other cars stopped. Sirens shrilled. My mother was dead.

I flew home from China. The family converged for the funeral. At the services, there was no open casket. Jean had endured enough.

My sisters sorted through Jean's possessions, and set aside items with personal meaning, things she wanted them to have anyway. She had marked some, directing them to their chosen owner.

I recall the last time my mother and I talked, on the day before she died. I was heading out for a night in Beijing. She was at home in Florida, just getting up.

I had recently been promoted to the newspaper’s foreign desk and my editors circulated a memo, saying things new bosses always say about new staff. I knew how much my mother loved hearing these kinds of things, so I had sent her a copy.

She carried the notice around in her purse, to show her friends and people she met. “My son is a journalist,” she probably said. “He works in a foreign land.”

When they returned her possessions, after she left us, the notice was still in her purse.

Now it is mine to keep.

Nicola also found keepsakes his own mother left behind.

“My eyes are caught by a thick diary, with a jeans texture cover,” he wrote. “I open it. I read the front page “Name: Angela, subject: Poetry.”

“I dig into the pages and I find out at that time my mother was fifteen.”

In the diary, he also discovered works by French poet Jaques Prévert and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, “which funnily enough, are my two favorite authors when speaking about love poems. I find song lyrics and more poems. But I also find verses I have never read and am quite sure were crafted by her.”

Her poetry. 

His mother had never told him any of this. 

“Why,” he later wrote, “will stay a secret forever.”

*

We see our mothers in ourselves, especially after they are gone.

We discover that the victories, accomplishments and insights we once claimed as our own actually come from them. And it feels good and satisfying to learn this, to finally acknowledge that connection.

Nicola learned this lesson far younger than I ever did.

“I always wondered where my poetry interest and inclination came from,” he wrote. “My mother was poetry; poetry as a way to live and love. To give everything without asking back. As a way to give meaning to things. Her death just allowed me to clearly see this. Sometimes people die to remind us we love them.”

No truer sentence has ever been written.

Nicola pledges to pay more attention to the people he loves, to try and find ways to recognize them, every single day, before it is time to say goodbye.

He presents me with a gift, an unpublished poem about loss. It is short and powerful, like all of Nicola’s work: “Quando ti manca qualcuno / vai a fissare le stelle / non per cercarlo nel cielo / ma per trovarlo dentro di te.”

“When you miss someone / go stare at the stars / not to look for them in the sky / but to find them inside you.”

I dedicate this poem to my mother, who taught me, in her own way, her own poetry. And I know that tonight Pomarico will be full of stars.  And that she will be there among them, and within me.