For H, and The Sunday Muse prompt #170:

**
She lingers like a ghost in the night,
this memory of my mother, framed
by a distant light: the stately stillness
of her furrowed brow, the slight tilt
of her chin catching the light, defiant.

The moment when the lone tear hangs –
perched impossibly as though straining
against the world – comes to me
again and again in a vision of the night,
its lingering like a thread tethering me
in my seasons of incertitude.