Buddha Has Returned

from his noble and eternal journey
in the form of my friend’s mother.
Buddha eats street tacos for her birthday
and laughs a long, hard laugh
at her son’s jokes and lets her grandson
tussle her hair. Buddha has borne 
three children and watched her body 
fall like slow glacier melt.
Buddha shops Target in old blue jeans,
her rear a square that somehow smiles
as she leans over the cart to drop in
a set of cotton sheets while talking 
to her daughter on the phone. Buddha grows
hollyhocks and makes flower dolls
for her granddaughters. Buddha taught
high school history for 25 years
and remembers the name 
of every European city 
she’s ever visited. Buddha buried 
her first husband. Then, her second.
Buddha takes care
of her special needs brother, scolds him
in his tantrums, laughs at his pants
around his ankles in the driveway,
tucks him into bed, though, like her,
he is old. He is also wise
and childlike. He might be the Tao. 
Buddha and the Tao argue 
and walk the grocery aisles in white sneakers, 
two enlightened spirits searching 
for frozen corn.

Last summer, Buddha rode a ship into Antarctica.
She stood at the bow and let the breeze
chill even the roots of her hair.
Before her, Buddha saw a garden of ice 
always in bloom. She held herself close
because everyone who once did that
is gone. Buddha will empty her beautiful
grievances like gifts before she parts again.
She has worn gray like a crown.
She has worn lips like two happy, fat lizards.
She has worn grief into belly laughter.
She gathers the world like her grandchildren
to her bosom and squeezes. 
Each time she enters the room,
her wide mouth smiling, 
a voice inside us cries 
a light, a light!

SUNNI BROWN WILKINSON

Sunni Brown Wilkinson is the author of The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press) and The Ache & The Wing (Sundress Publications). She was a winner of the New Ohio Review’s NORward Poetry Prize and the 2020 Joy Harjo Prize from Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts.