Christmas Gift

A forgotten photo
now reproduced, enlarged, found in a box
saggy with age, dampens your creased cheeks.
"It's my mother," you explain, unwrapped,
as if I didn't know.  Her funeral held
before Christmas on your fourteenth birthday.

Like the scattered Russian
                nesting dolls underfoot
                                   how do we fit together?

Grandma
forever young,
you unguarded as a child
absorbed with your present,
me now feeling like your mother
in this stack, somewhere, my own daughter.



Marilyn Aschoff Mellor