Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

My Mother's Next Life

          -For my mother, Phyllis (1919-1993)

She doesn't believe in reincarnation
but plays this game for me
if it makes me feel better.

"Ok," she says:
"I would like to be reborn in the USA
the best country in the world
I want to come back as a man next time
I would be in show business
a dancer, the next Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly
there is no one like them now
I can't come back as Cary Grant
because then I would
be in love with myself."

I know she thinks this is a silly game
but it makes me feel better
to think that she is 
at some kind of peace
with the fact that there's
less than a year to live.

I
would come back
as my
mother.

No Tongue Can Tell

          Galveston, September 8, 1900

I can't give you the shriek of the
dark wind as it breaks through the 
wood slants of our home on the beach;
the grand piano surfing the crest 
of a six foot wave down Main Street;
the crack of the foundation as waves 
lift?up the orphanage,
the silence after 90 children drown;
clear dawn of the morning after, 
stench of six thousand bodies;
women hang from trees, their long hair 
caught in the branches as they
ran from the water;
the bodies of the orphans
still tethered together in ten rows,
each row tied to a dead nun;
the army forcing into service
the men still standing,
making them gather the 
bodies for burning, keeping them
sane with whiskey.

The horror did not drive us away.
The injured and shell-shocked recovered,
we built our city higher, like the
builders of Babel hoping that God would not notice.
And if He can't protect us- 
if Mary, virgin saint of the sea, can't
save the children and nuns who
died with her name on their lips- 
then He can at least leave us alone.

Terry Stevenson is a Senior Assistant City Attorney for the city of Burbank, California. He specializes in employment and construction law. Stevenson has been writing poems since high school. His poetry has appeared in Electrum, Poetry/L.A., Rattle, Spillway and ONTHEBUS and in various anthologies, including Shards, Off-Ramp, and Corners (all published by Pasadena Poets), The New Los Angeles Poets (Bombshelter Press), Truth and Lies that Press for Life (Artifact Press, Ltd.), 13 LA Poets (Bombshelter Press, 1990), and most recently, So Luminous the Wildflowers: An Anthology of California Poets (Tebot Bach, 2003). Stevenson is a graduate of Loyola Law School, Los Angeles.