Music at My Mother’s Funeral by Faith Shearin

During the weeks when we all believed my mother

was likely to die she began to plan

her funeral and she wanted us, her children,

to consider the music we would play there. We remembered

the soundtrack of my mother’s life: the years when she swept

the floors to the tunes of an eight track cassette called Feelings,

the Christmas when she bought a Bing Crosby album

about a Bright Hawaiian Christmas Day. She got Stravinsky’s

Rite of Spring stuck in the tape deck of her car and for months

each errand was accompanied by some kind

of dramatic movement. After my brother was born,

there was a period during which she wore a muumuu

and devoted herself to King Sunny Ade and his

African beats. She ironed and wept to Evita, painted

to Italian opera. Then, older and heavier, she refused

to fasten her seatbelt and there was the music

of an automated bell going off every few minutes,

which annoyed the rest of us but did not seem to matter

to my mother who ignored its relentless disapproval,

its insistence that someone was unsafe.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetrymagazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2013 by the Alaska Quarterly Review. Faith Shearin’s most recent book of poems is Moving the Piano, Stephen F. Austin Univ. Press, 2011. Poem reprinted from the Alaska Quarterly Review, Vol. 30, No. 3 & 4, by permission of Faith Shearin and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.