Kathy in the Sky with Diamonds

1.
A South Philly son has a story to tell
about his ma-belle's bout with cancerous spells,
committing her like age to a hospice cell

and a bed by her daughter's sleeping all
giving blanket to a mother's broken-bodied fall

down the still hour before birth where,
not long during the end of all care,

She awoke again. Again, like Lucy to light,
through cracks in the streets of a lily-flowering night

blooming over the weedy streets of all our Italies-
no home for the likes of the earth's Eleanor Rigbies.

2.
A bird call and signal to spring,
Kath sings the anthem for the blizzard's end,
tapping water ice-fresh in revolutions of thaw.
The seed she searches out she becomes and sprouts,
thin like stalks into fruit's fragrant mist,
playing the sky as a teenage girl
who spends her heaven with Sgt. Pepper
and his merry troop of hill-fools,
tripping on magic down Blue Jay Way
while coffee percolates like vinyl's pop-and-crisp
in the early summer of strawberry-sweet fields,
forever.