poetry contest - runner up: G.R. Kramer - Passage

Ninety months since my mother’s last breath
but she returns in dreams about death
to tell of that shadow heart that drums 
only for itself, that hollow home 
of memory my flesh passes through, 
that discard skin of forgotten folks 
before my time who lived there and charmed 
bright chrysanthemums, that living dream 
that she wakes me into when I breathe
in and out to the skirr of crickets
as questions rummage my ransacked brain
for lame retorts. A last flower flames
as the light over the hillside fails
till the lifting moon recurs blood pale