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.