Collaboration #20 Anita Skeen wrote, Guillermo Delgado responded

Birthday Poem for my Mother, Gone Two Years

They perish. They cannot be brought back.
 The secret worlds are not regenerated
            --Yevgeny Yevtushenko


You would have said
you had no secret
worlds, that secrets

made for trouble,
something you
could do without.

What about those nights
you sat so late at the old Singer?
Where did the treadle

take you? To what world
did you travel when the tumor
snatched your mother?

What walks
did you recall
to hold her hand?

Those hopes you never
spoke, those regrets
catching you off guard,

again and again,
the doors you opened,
then closed, when

you were alone.
Now, trouble is
there’s no transport

to those sites,
the last ship
sailed from port

on your final breath.
Towns erased their coordinates.
Eighty-five years

flattened like a city
in a pop-up book,
lost like Atlantis.

3/27/10

Guillermo Delgado’s Untitled #20, 2010, mixed media on wood, 8” x 10″