A Mirror and a Photograph

My mother I don’t remember, who died

when I was two

had just this vacant look, glazed,

that greets me in the mirror.

I remember a photo from a hunting trip.

She is about twenty-eight and

sits on a log like a girl on a piano stool,

smiles at the lens as though it separates

by light years

the viewer from the viewed.

Her vision stops so far inside

the camera’s eye

I cannot catch her,, but I see

it was a cold November morning

by the way she hugs her jacket tightly to her.

About the author

name: Judy Daniel

Judy Daniel is a poet and fiction writer who, at age six, was delighted by stories at the Riverview Library’s Saturday morning Children Hour. After teaching and writing in England and Spain, she returned to Minnesota to become a founding member of  Poets-in-the School (now The Loft).