Aasta May, Mom

Sharing a love of words, I should have shared
more time valuing the long and short of it all – vowels

beautifully balanced across a name, that balancing
in saying I could leave when I might have remained,

then living so far away it would always be down to
language keeping us close, expressions of closeness

never lost when stretched across years and miles. Reading
between the lines of that stretch was another act of poise,

but there were no shortcomings then or now, and these
words will not be chimed to be more than sound.

Not yet. Your words to me always honest and true –
poetry and letters to a son in England, an amalgam

of our roots and a selfless faith in the future, showing
me how to keep it simple: always Mom, not Mum.