Veronica by Jan Bosman (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

Veronica
by Jan Bosman

When I was just 18, I met George at a dance.
He offered to take me home.
When he ran his hand past my knee, I said,
If that’s what you want, we’re done.
So we dated for a year, and he waited.
We had a double wedding
with my younger sister and Roger in 1925.
George came from a boys-will-be-boys mother.
I came from a you-can-protect-anything-
you-can-put-your-hand-over grandmother.
I don’t think I was ever enough for him.
When we had been married 55 years,
he left me for our flirtatious “friend.”
Then he came back: no apologies, no discussion.
After George died, I often dreamed
that we had gone to a picnic together;
but when it was time to come home,
I could not find him. I could never find him.

PAINTING: Woman with a Picnic Basket by Raimundo de Madrazo (1890).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I wrote the poem, “Veronica,” to highlight the complicated and rather sad more than 50-year relationship my mother and father shared. The poem appeared in the 2018 WFOP Museletter when a call went out for poems written in the first person.

PHOTO: The author as a child with her sister and parents.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jan Bosman lives and writes in Woodstock, Illinois. Poetry selected her to play on its team many years ago, and she has been honing her skills ever since. For 12 years in a row, she has promoted National Poetry Month in April through a column in Illinois newspapers. She is a member of the Atrocious Poets, Woodstock, Illinois, the PaperBirch Poets, Northern Wisconsin, and the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets.