Trying Our Best

Last night
an ache so real I stirred awake.

There are so many ways to live
and I try them on, one by one
in deep sleep resurrecting
sorrows long gone.

My mother calls and I can
almost touch her face, now soft,
her smile, now easy. She is yielding
and I am arms stretched to find
the emptiness of expectation.

The trick, she says slipping away, is to keep moving.

Most everything is waiting or prayer
so I stand silent, pebble small
smaller, gone.

On another night
I stand cedar tall and solid.
Leaf and branch wear certainty.
Every root a permanence.

Fake it 'til you make it, she calls out.

Some nights I am sea,
the steady pull and roll of turn and tumble,
a rush forward and a push away.

I’ve never been a seagull, though my mother urges me to try.
They fly because they think they can, she says,
her words lifted from a dusty
poster hanging in our 1970s home.

At night in dreams that feel wide awake
my mother waits for me, eager to share
platitudes we both hope will hold.

— Drew Myron

Trying Our Best — collage materials from Surface Design, a journal of the Surface Design Association, 2000; and Akris ad appearing in The New York Times Magazine, 2025.

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