My mother passed away in the winter of 2016. For her funeral service, I wrote a poem for her. It is presented here for her memory. For mother’s day 2016, while my mother was suffering from dementia and could no longer recognize me, I wrote: “My mother’s life is ‘officially’ tragic—in a Black-working-class relatively understated way. It is that of an only child who lived mostly within her powerful imagination—an imagination that protected her from the reality of her ‘beautiful’ mother until it could do no more.”