My Mother's Hair
for Jennifer Spector
by Nancy Holmes
Winner of the 2024 Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem
I know a woman who keeps her dead mother’s hair,
a pair of auburn braids, severed and sewn onto a scarf.
Two years after my mother’s death, I walk
in the soft, searing claws of the sun.
Cool shade from a tree washes over me,
flooding through the hairs on my arms.
Yesterday, my grandchild asked,
why are there shadows?
If the sun is so strong,
why can’t it shine through things?
Things are a gathering, so bound even the sun
can’t part them. That is life, all braided.
A coffin slides on rails to the cremation oven.
A woman preserves a piece of her mother coiled in a box.
In the sun, microscopic shadows of the hair on my arms
stripe my skin. These days, a forest or a grassland
can be flooded with a tidal wave of flames so fast
all the shadows burn.
After my walk, in the kitchen, I open a bag
of frozen blueberries my mother packed for me
before she died. Among the dusky pellets, I find
a single grey hair clinging to the frost.
What the sun can’t penetrate — boxes, trees,
cloth, ropes of hair, purple berries, grief —
flames transform into senseless ash.
The freezer bag releases a trace of scent:
the berries’ ghostly nectar. I drop
a handful of icy fruit into the bowl
and eat my mother’s hair.
Nancy Holmes has six published collections of poetry, most recently Arborophobia (U of Alberta Press). She is the editor of Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems (Wilfrid Laurier UP). She lives in Kelowna and has recently retired from teaching Creative Writing at UBC Okanagan. www.nancyholmes.ca.
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