Sister Talk

At night, after bear hugs from Daddy,

Don't let the bedbugs bite!

Mama's "Sweet dreams, sleep tight"
still echoing in the tiny room,
light's out and we would lay there
in our flannel gowns beneath the quilts
and one of us would whisper,
"What do you want to talk about?"
Fast forward over forty years and we've
been known to say the very same
as soon as it is dark. Discussions have
grown up, as we have, subjects that would
make our mother blush, perhaps, but
little girls who giggled nightly as we did
are destined to retain the giggles into middle age.
When we are in our nineties, should we share
a room, I dare say it will be the same when
once the lamps are flicked off, phones dimmed
(by then Lord only knows what they'll be like).
"What do you want to talk about?"
That's another forty years into the future,
so much life we have to live to mold into
the bedtime stories of the last nights we will share.


(c) Ellen Gillette, 2013