7/24/2009



by Wilda Morris


Calculation


My daughter chokes out a reproach

when her son tells me,

“You’re almost seventy!”

She glares as she asks him,

“What did you say?”

Abashed, he struggles for a reply

till I say, “it’s true.”

She turns toward me,

arithmetic in her eyes.


Published in

Poem, 96 (November 2006), p. 36.