I am sitting in sunlight reading
when Debbie calls to talk from some store
to ask me what size coat she should buy me.
We decide I don’t need a new coat.

It is mid-morning on a Saturday.
I go upstairs to wake my daughter
who is twenty-one years old
and who has a psychology test to study for.

I lean down to kiss her and it is then
I see for the first time in her life
how much she looks like my mother
when she was this age, the rest of life

as they say, ahead of her.

“Waking up My Daughter” by Greg Kosmicki from Some Hero of the Past. © Word Poetry Books, 2006.