Dorothy Pope

Late Sunbeams

‘It’s lovely to see you so happy,’
my mother said, and I, startled to guilt
from an hour absorbed
in writing instead of offering
her cocoa with solicitude,

realised that she preferred my daughter face
to that of anxious carer.

My off-duty selfhood lifted her
from patient status
and restored her seniority.

She so basked in
motherhood, her words came clearly
through dementia’s fog.

‘Lovely to see you so happy,’
she beamed, and late afternoon sun
danced on her silvered hair.

Dorothy Pope began writing at the age of
fifty-three having taken early retirement
from teaching. She is author of The Fourth
Man – A Selection of Poems (self-published)
and The Summerhouse Poems. She teaches
English to individual pupils in a garden
shed at her Harrow on the Hill home.
Disabled, married (to The Fourth Man)
for fifty years of heaven, she has two sons.