My mother once asked
how big the moon appeared to me to be.
“The size of a dime,” I said
waiting patiently
for context.
Her millisecond longer than usual
pause
was difficult, I remember,
to decipher.
She then said, “I heard today
that however big the moon appears to you to be
is the size of your greed.”
“How big,” I asked quickly
while simultaneously wishing I’d said
‘The eraser end of a pencil,’
which sometimes was also true,
“does it look to you?”
Again
with the millisecond longer than usual pause
she replied,
“…It looks
to me” (and here her tone swiftly flowed
passed a hint of shame,
to amusement,
to ‘maybe I should do something about that but, really, isn’t it too late for all that?’
thus revealing
the cause
of her pause) “like a Ferris wheel…
“…Does it really,”
she sheepishly continued,
“look like a dime
to you?”
I may or may not have kept my alternate response to myself
since I valued my mother’s pleasure in my goodness
and she was always good enough
to lavish it
upon me.
One might say
that I was greedy for it.
Greedier than the size of a dime.
Or the eraser end
of a pencil.
Bread in the Desert 