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My Mother the Car

By Phill LoFaso

PROMPT — What is Love?

I lower the window

and smell the cold crisp joy

of a Christmas morning.

Trees dance in the breeze,

clouds hover, loudly shaped.

Your laminated smile looks down

through every mile

held in place by the sacred heart.

Gucci glasses peek

from beneath the seat

to whisper “I’m still here."

Is that you through the moon-roof

shining down

or just a hole in the sky so we can breathe?


Sleek and bright and mostly white,

she may be old

yet it doesn’t show,

as she navigates the treacherous road.

She won’t let me go too fast

but how she loves that gas.

Her leopard-skin pillow

gets me going like that great weeping willow.

Glance up for a rear view,

just can’t stare at the past or I’ll miss where I’m going to.

Your half-pack of spearmint

and your faint scent;

everything I sense says you

in my mother, the car.


Heavy rain hits the windscreen.

The streets are hard to see.

Tall oaks lean in.

Untold threats unseen.

The unknown and the undreamed

wait just around the bend.

When sadness fills my mind,

and weather has me driving blind,

one touch away

there’s a song to play.

Though in the end

it’s the music that gets me,

playing in my mother, the car.

That’s my mother, the car.


You may lay in the cold and far away

where the granite states your name,

yet you still surround me.

Even in your absence

you never cease to astound me.

So, I lower the window

and smell the cold crisp joy

of a Christmas morning.

Trees dance in the breeze.

Clouds hover, loudly shaped.

Your laminated smile looks down

through every mile,

held in place by the sacred heart,

always there in my mother, the car.


 

Phill LoFaso was introduced to poetry by his mom as a young boy, to help him overcome his difficulty concentrating while reading books (ADD before it was a thing!). His very first poem, a haiku, has been hanging on mom's wall since 1967. For over 50 years, and still to this day, Phill writes poetry and music as a way to express his joy, pain, fears, hopes, and all that still races through his very busy brain. He writes from Huntington, NY.

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