This poem is dedicated to all mothers, for what moms do every day of the year. It appears in my 2019 full-length collection, Dreaming of Lemon Trees: Selected Poems, published by Finishing Line Press.

Here’s me kissing my mom, Carmella, sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

Mother at a School Bus Stop

A middle-aged woman with a white canvas coat
stands with her two young children
at a school bus stop on a misty gray morning.
The boy and girl are bundled up
and jabbering as they bounce around—
unaware that Mondays should be devoid of glee.

When the bus pulls up, the mother hugs the children.
The kids separate from her breast,
scurry up the steps and claim an empty seat up front.
The mother waves goodbye to the little faces
pressed against the window and watches
as the bus pushes away from the curb,
ejecting a thin cloud of exhaust.

The woman turns around,
waits for the traffic light to change
and then crosses the street,
marching up the block to return home.
Once there, dirty dishes, unmade beds and
cigarette butts heaped in black plastic ashtrays
demand her attention until mid-morning,
when the woman leaves the house and rushes to work.

She then counts down the hours
until the school bus returns to the curb
and her two kids hop off and leap into her arms,
almost in unison.