My mother’s voice
is a scissor
in my eye.

Words spill out of her mouth
like snakes.

We have only each other, now
even stones
have different names.

I wrote this poem in August 2001 upon arriving at my father’s house in Athens. Our first two weeks were spent cleaning, reordering and giving away most of the things he had accumulated over the years. It was then that I realized that with my father’s death, many of my mother’s dreams died as well. It was during those intense six weeks in Greece, that my mother and I began to heal and develop a common language.