WELL DONE! NIGGLING AT CORNERS OF THE MIND by Mike Turner

She so loved life

The glory of a morning’s sunrise

Bringing promise of the coming day

Learning a new fact

Re-reading a favorite book

Cherishing family

Making new friends

But something was niggling at the corners of her mind

Spinning cobwebs holding deep shadows

Drawing curtains of emptiness across her world

Slowly she began to forget

Numbers, words, phrases

Dates, places

Names, faces

Until now she sits

Day after day

In a “memory care facility”

Though she has little memory left to care for

Yet, still,

Each time I see her

She smiles

So loving life

Glorying in the morning sunshine

Anticipating what the new day will bring

Each fact learned afresh

Each story read for the first time

(Though I read to her, she having forgotten how)

Each person, a new friend

And when she looks in my eyes

Her countenance glows

As something niggles at the corners of her mind

She can sense it’s there

Though she can’t put a name to it

Or to me

And so she just smiles

And I remember

For both of us

Mike Turner is a poet living on the U.S. Gulf Coast. He has over 350 poems published in over 75 journals and anthologies including “Well Read Magazine;” his lyric, “Sense of Peace,” was awarded the Alabama Writers’ Cooperative’s 2023 Roger Williams Peace Prize. Mike’s book, Visions and Memories, is available on Amazon.