In the words of my Mom, who forgot the words for many things. She lost the word for clouds, but ingeniously said: "Look at the sky pieces!"

Sky Pieces

sky pieces (they say)

are merely clouds, but oh

how words fail us,

like a mind unraveling,

a tapestry undone.

i am a student (they say)

of words, of thoughts, of dreams,

but what are these

compared to the sky pieces

in my mother's eyes?

she, who once held the world

in her gentle grasp,

now holds only fragments,

sky pieces,

beautiful and untamed.

in the lecture halls (they say)

we learn of language,

its power, its fallibility,

but no sonnet, no verse

can capture the devastation.

Alzheimer's, a thief in the night,

steals away the familiar,

leaves behind only

sky pieces,

a new language of loss.

yet in her eyes,

in her sky pieces,

i see resilience,

i see love,

i see my mother.

and so, i write (they say)

not of loss, but of discovery,

not of forgetting, but of remembering,

the beauty in the broken,

the poetry in the sky pieces.

Images created with the help of Playgroundai.com. 2023.