Goodbye, Mamma

This post is dedicated to my mother, Fleta Floella Dyer, who left this realm on Thanksgiving day, 2006. She was much too young to leave her children and her mother, and she is profoundly missed. This poem by Stephen Crane seems appropriate to me right now:

The Heart

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.

I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter--bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."