Mother Poems Archives - Page 2 of 4

2019-07-232019-07-23

Favorite Colors

You notice blue
bonnets blooming
on Texas highways,
blue hues in birds
not normally blue
but black and blue
like grackles’ heads,
old ladies with blue hair
not on black, but white
the tint a rinse gone awry,
a bad dye job like the time
you pulled up in the garage
not one, not two, not three
but four hours late,
your hair orange. You
said it looked better than
before first glance
of green, you’d seen a horror
movie: Frankenstein. Oh, how
you’d die if social climbers
disclosed ungodly sheens
not once, not twice, but three
times red and gray
gone green
gone yellow
gone orange
flecks of thread in blue
couch where we’d sit
and chat, just the two of us,
over coffee and blueberry scones.

—Laurie Kolp, from Hello, It’s Your Mother, Finishing Line Press

2019-05-032019-05-03

Counterbalance

It was horrible but it wasn’t all horrible.
—Cecilia Woloch

Afterward, it was the satisfaction of paying a debt, except
she wasn’t one of those mothers who made us feel
as if we owed her for childbirth and raising us.
It was knowing I didn’t shirk changing the colostomy bag
or dressing the disfigured zipper of staples that closed
her wound, breastbone to groin.

Once I woke to a midnight crash: her with a halo of blood
on the bathroom floor.
It was knowing I could love like that.

Mealtimes, she would frown, push away child’s portions
no matter what recipe I tried, except the marijuana-pill night
when at 10 p.m. she asked me to bake a cake,
and I called my sister: Mum has the munchies!

Chemo shrank her into a stooped monk in a hooded robe.
Strands of fine hair littered her pillow
until it was time to shop for a wig.
I tried on some too. We laughed when I looked worse than she did.
She sprang for the expensive one, nicknamed it Dixie,
felt almost pretty.

And she recovered: her sweetness, generosity,
pain-in-the-ass-ness, even her hair for seven years.
Then it was hearing cancer again from the doctor
who didn’t want to say it, and me expelling the word
like a magician pulling a grenade from my mouth.

I hoped hospice spoke the truth, that it was okay not to feed her,
that her mostly closed eyes, the rambling words
meant she was processing what she needed to: memories,
reconciliations, the willingness to go.
Then, it was knowing she had checked off her final item
when my brother arrived, recovered from his own cancer,
and she woke for a last moment to say his name, Philip.

—Karen Paul Holmes, from No Such Thing as Distance

2019-03-052019-03-05

Growing Season

Too much spring rain.
The gutters burst
with hundreds of miniature maples.
They have germinated
in their own rotting pods
and stretch their leaves
to the sun. Yank them out,
I tell my husband,
before the neighbors talk.
He climbs a ladder,
cuts the stems loose
with a trowel.

Outside Beijing, the mother
of our next child
digs all day, hair sweeping
the fine soil where black seeds
roll from her fingers.
More drought, they warn,
but she plants anyway,
for you never know
when a storm will hit.
Today, row markers and dirt.
Tomorrow, plump cabbages
glistening on the table.

—Tania Runyan, from Simple Weight, FutureCycle Press

2019-02-25

Blessing For My Daughter Leaving for School

You will swim with sharks,
harvest sponges, try to save

lionfish, turtles, the endless sea.
You will breathe in water,

Daughter, who learned
to breathe in me.

Everything tender
must be released.

—Sarah Dickenson Snyder, from The Human Contract, Aldrich Press

2019-02-212019-02-25

Timeless

Some girls, no matter their age, know
Beauty authored their bones, sure as star-fall,
and inhabits them still, extending
a singular charm that delights, like the one
collected with joy that adorns
my mother’s mid-century bracelet,
tarnished now. Can you picture
the tiniest kitchen scale?—
its dial the size of a dilated pupil,
the needle, an eyelash
that really swivels,
from one to our culturally perfect ten, although
grace, bone-deep, begins, Mama said,
light years away, arriving
among us, over and over.
Nor can it be reckoned, or earned,
no matter the distance traveled,
sheltering as the night sky.
Shine, then, she said, shine
before the body winks out.

—Laurie Klein, author of Where the Sky Opens. “Timeless” first appeared in Adanna Literary Journal and online Abbey of the Arts

2019-02-202019-02-21

Captain Depth Perception

I see you like space
between my car and the raised
bumper of an F150 sitting
wider than yellow parking lines.
I know when to brake and back
up, when to cut the wheel
so I turn just far enough
into your space, filling it
with so much of myself that
almost I fill it all, almost
I feel the crunch of fender and truck.
My power saves
paint jobs at a price.
Every hero has her heal.
Mine’s the depth I can’t stop
sensing, a constant knowledge
of our world packed tight,
nearing collision, and the fear
of someone cutting too sharp,
closing the space completely.
At night I know twin lights
of speeding cars enough
to pull out and see we’re safe
in our sufficient depth of space.

—Marcus Goodyear, from Barbies at Communion, T. S. Poetry Press

2019-02-202019-02-20

Stayed

for Ann Voskamp

Why do we not
leave home.
Is it really for fear
of what lies
beyond, or rather
for fear that the
roof will abscond
with the doors
and the shutters
we’ve always known.
And who would they
blame if it happened
just so, if the whole
curtained place simply
picked up its stakes,
disappeared on the wind
in our absence. What
are we really afraid
of, why do we not
leave home.

—L.L. Barkat, from InsideOut: Poems, International Arts Movement

2019-02-202019-02-20

To Be a Pilgrim

To be a pilgrim is to ring the stones
with the clean music of your best black heels,
each click a lucky strike that sparks a fire
to see by, that lights up the long and level road
you walk with no map, no stick, no wheels
to relieve you when your feet ache and tire.

To be a pilgrim own what you own,
stuff it in your clutch, lug it in your tote,
all the heavy history you’d like to lose
nestled up against your dead mother’s shoes.
To be a pilgrim you must be a killer
of myth, a new invention of desire.
Every pilgrim is a truth-teller.
Every pilgrim is a liar.

—Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, from Still Pilgrim, Paraclete Press, used by permission of the poet

2019-02-202019-02-20