Today is the last day of poem a day for April. I was super ambitious this year trying to do two separate 30 day prompt runs. Let’s just say I wasn’t successful in the month’s time but I got 37/60 poems completed in a month. I’m feeling pretty accomplished seeing as it is garden season and I have a full time job. I will probably finish the rest of the poems as time allows. There are a few prompts that still interest me enough to keep going.
As it happens, the year I started using prompts to write poems was several months after my mother died suddenly. I found that all the words left me. Grief is both magical and destructive. It is the one thing that can make you feel so deeply and be numb at the same time. One of the prompts that April was a time of day poem. That prompt happen to come up again, 11 years later. So I thought it would be nice to revisit the same time of day I used for the first one. It is a lesson in healing, I think. Here are the two poems. I hope you enjoy.
Elegy for a Forgotten Time
(after Matchbox Twenty)
“It’s 3am, I must be lonely….”
Years ago my mother called me
in the middle of the night
telling me this song reminded her of me.
I was younger and reckless then,
never as wild as her, but enough
that she saw some of herself in me.
At the time, I told her it was a cool song
just to get her off the phone.
Over the years the song pops on the radio
and I recognize the music, but never
bothered with the words other than the chorus.
She’s gone now and I am sitting in my car crying
over the lyrics, over how much they remind me of her.
I want to call her and tell her I get it, I understand
she was scared that night and came to me for some solace
and I turned her away. I will never get that moment back,
never be able to tell her it will all be ok in the morning.
If she would have had a funeral
I would have played that song.
I would have sang it as loud as I could
choking on my own tears.
“Well, I can’t help
but be scared of it all sometimes.”
Aleathia Drehmer 2014
Here We Are Again
“It’s 3 a.m., I must be lonely”
is a line that still haunts me.
I hear it on the radio
and can crumble or cry,
sometimes both.
When I wake in the middle
of the night at 3 a.m,
the song plays in my head.
Once on a sunny fall
afternoon, a cover band
played it and I softly
called out to my mother
crying silently with sun
burning away my tears
and surrounded by strangers
I felt like a lost child.
So now, eleven years
after the first poem,
I am still wondering
if she was trying to tell
me something important
when she had no strength
to be vulnerable enough
to ask for my help.
Aleathia Drehmer 2025
Be kind to each other. Call your mother back even when you think you’re bigger than what she has to say. Someday, you will hold the phone in your hand with no number left to dial.
As always: Read. Write. Support the small press and independent bookstores. Make art. Dance in the rain. Spend time with friends.
Aleathia
Aleathia Drehmer 