“The Final Word”

Purchased before fur was vilified, Mother’s fur coat was well-used during South Dakota winters when snowbanks piled up to our second-story windows, but it found little use once they moved to Arizona the year I left home to go to college. It was 30 years later, after her death, that we found it in the back of her closet.  Along with her car, it was the one item that my mother had insisted should go to me. Ironic, I thought, as I had so often self-righteously railed against her possession of it. Attached to it was a copy of a poem I had written in college and sent to her, a line of which said, “I’ve lost the means to thaw my soul.”  Across the bottom of the poem pinned to the coat she had scrawled, “Make of it a parka for your soul”.

For dVerse poets, we are to write a prose poem containing this quote from an Alice Walker poem: “Make of it a parka for your soul”.