Mother, Don't Cry Poem by Simone Harriman

Mother, it's cold outside
Your rivers and tears have turned to ice
Know this is the glacial end
The sun will never warm
Your forests and fields again

Mother, I speak to you through dreams
In the long days of night
With your dead poets
Exhumed from my pocket
With a chimera of babbling prophets
And a troop of tearful soldiers

Mother, all your Eden's have died
Wars have polluted their gardens
While tongues blew hard in the wind
Lip service swept across your deserts

Mother, don't cry
Look heavenward one last time
Gravity is working against us
Soon we will drift with our dross
In the throes of death
Flotsam and jetsam
We will go shivering in the night