Things we can never know

How can I say I knew her?
This woman who has been both motherless
and mother for most of her life.

Her children with their childish wants and needs,
always hungry, or dirty, or hurt.
Their small crises and petty ills absorbed her,
until her days diminished, yet never ended.

She would stand, one arm across her waist
as if to hold herself together,
or protect some precious part of herself
from their clumsy, grasping hands.

She must have stolen some time away:
to visit her mothers grave, shaving the cost off the weekly shop
to lay flowers, to pray, or not.
She might have dawdled on the way home, gazing into shop windows
trying to glimpse herself there... squinting to avoid her reflection.

Maybe she sat for long hours in small cafes,
her appetites woken by the hiss and steam of the coffee machine
and overheard conversations, the blur of life and colours passing by
outside the window, the hope and promise on the faces
of confident young men as they tried to catch her eye.

Did she ever stumble, in a moments rush, upon her mother crying,
- the whispered words, the kiss on the hair, the primitive rocking
as instinctive as breathing, did not quite reassure -
and realise, with a childs innate knowing,
that she does not know her mother.