She’s gone now.
Ashes cast upon a river,
Where she had paused
And smoked, gazing
Into the future beside.
Our laughter quieted to the stillness
Of the night.
Her encouragement, a distant memory—
“I am dying for a cigarette,”
she would say.
Her beguiling comments,
When visitors left:
“Thanks for leaving,”
She’d laugh and smoke
A cigarette,
To celebrate their dismissal.
The pictures on the wall,
Stained from tar and nicotine,
Are faded memories gone and forgotten.
Her tattered book collection burned.
There were her hospital stays,
Where she snuck outside to smoke her cigarettes—
A dismal remembrance of her lung cancer.
I remember
Her hair beneath my fingertips,
Braided silently with hope.
Then her hateful end—
Sitting in a nursing home,
Cast there by thoughtless,
Careless sons,
Covered in bruises
From head to toe.
“Did they beat her there?”
I wondered.
All the end of a life
Lived,
Dying for a cigarette.
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