American Life in Poetry: ‘Illusion’

By Kwame Dawes

Rachel Eliza Griffiths has written poems and composed photographs in response to the loss of her mother. She has always been fascinated by the exchange between birth and death that characterizes their relationship. “Illusion” is doing the same work of connecting the haunting memory and spirit of her mother to her own awareness, her own mortality, and her turn to live and fill the space vacated by her mother. I typically do not quote poets speaking of their work in this column, but I found this gem by Griffiths from an interview that seems a fit introduction to this poem: “With the death of my mother, the woman (myself) can’t go back out of the world until she mothers herself. I must go forward to my own beginning and to consider my own death.”

Illusion

Waiting inside of the night,

I could make out the mound

& my mother’s eyes, the blank embrace

of innocence when she returned

from the other side of the light

where everything wept

as it was loved & forgotten.

It’s your turn, it’s always

your turn,

the night says.

Poem copyright ©2020 by Rachel Eliza Griffiths, “Illusion” from Seeing The Body (W.W. Norton & Company, 2020.) Quote from “Anatomy of Grief: A Conversation with Rachel Eliza Griffiths” By Sarah Herrington, LA Review of Books, October 13, 2020. lareviewofbooks.org/article/anatomy-of-grief-a-conversation-with-rachel-eliza-griffiths/. American Life in Poetry is made possible by the Poetry Foundation and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We do not accept unsolicited submissions.