Let me die writing, Mother
When you come to take me home
May you find me flowing ink
May you find me impassioned,
with stained fingers and knit brow
Let me die writing.
Let me die in my natural state, Mother,
Writing,
Writing into vast gulfs
Let me drown in liquid pleasure
of line and word and delicious sentence
Let me spend my last moments
licking sticky poems from my fingertips
or smearing cake
battered memoir across a blank page
Let me die writing.
Let me die inside the pleasure of writing, Mother
Your Mother alone knows
why you brought me here, Mother,
surely not for any greatness but
to follow the unravellings of spools
of swift-colored yarn, soft, mine,
following it in faith and in abandon, Mother,
until the words – and Your Mother alone knows what else —
end.
Let me die here, Mother,
writing into the tangle of these things
I must unbury the words to match.
Ivy Raff’s (she/they) poetry appears in The American Journal of Poetry, Nimrod International Journal, and West Trade Review, among several others. A current nominee for the Best of the Net Anthology, she is a 2023 Alaska State Parks artist in residence, a finalist in the 2021 sweettooth//HONEY Micropoetry Contest. Her work has received scholarship support from the Colgate Writers’ Conference. She’s studied Zen Buddhist approaches to writing under Natalie Goldberg and Subhana Barzaghi, and was selected as the mentee of Kwame Dawes at Atlantic Center for the Arts. Read more at ivyraff.com.