I am becoming my mother,
like countless women before me became theirs,
all withering skin
wry remarks
and unremembered things
We both had our days as peach-laden boughs of the same tree.
We walked with authority,
first she
then me,
both heavy with our fruits
heady with our responsibilities
and lavish with our endless judgments
We sprang up from our beds every morning
like a step springs from the earth that bears it.
We harnessed the downward force
and bounded forward
heedless of warnings
Who had time to heed warnings?
The duties were many,
the moments too few
Gravity both gave us our bounce
and kept our charges still.
What neither of us knew then
we both know now,
she dead, me following her closely:
As much as we loved gravity,
gravity couldn’t have cared less
about us
I posted this nearly five years ago, even before the birth of Hive, on that other chain. @carolkean, who peruses old posts (who goes back four or more years?! @Carolkean, that's who!) sent it to me recently. I read the poem, not knowing I had written it. It was so good, I almost couldn't believe it was even mine.
So here it is again, because I can do that in the Blockchain Poets community. I made a very few minor punctuation changes. Thank you for reading it. I appreciate and love you all.
BAM!!!!
lol I was feeling like a tiny speck of dust that day, I remember. Powerful, but very small.
My hubs sometimes says to me 'are you feeling tiny weeny today' which nails it often.
Thank you!
Well I'm glad Carol dug this up and caused it to resurface, since it's stunning. Seriously. I'm in love. <3
I know, right?! I'm stunned too. I know what I was going through at the time, and it's very from that time. But it's timeless too. A great one, if I do say so myself. Thanks so much for the reblog.
FANTASTIC poem, and what's really incredible to me as a writer and reader is how we can go back to something we wrote way back when, and not even recognize our own words as we admire these words, nodding, yes, yes, this is true, this good stuff, this is -- something I wrote!
There's a story there, or a ten-million-dollar-study at Harvard, on how we forget the good that we do and did. We forget. WRITE STUFF DOWN and SAVE IN A SAFE PLACE.
I'm so glad to see this poem revisited - especially in time for Mother's Day.
You are magnificent, @owasco!
I think I already told you this, but when you sent it to me, you did say that it was mine. But when I read it, it was so good, I thought I must have misunderstood you. I love how humble you've made me feel here. I have to print it out and tuck into my hardcopy poem folder. Thanks so much for revisiting it!
We are on the same wave-length or something like that, I wrote about my first post on that other site, but because of today's prompt. lol
I like your poem, I can only wish to be like my Mother.
It's so good I can't believe you wrote it either:):)
lol
Beautiful verse :)
Thank you!
Mothers are priceless, what a beautiful poem this is.
Thank you!
Beautiful poem about age, experience, and personal history.
Thank you!
So I got an email from an agent asking me to review this guy's book before Father's Day.
His mother poem (for all his talks on NPR) just doesn't compare with yours.
Had I not revisited yours this morning, I might have agreed to review his book.
This cycle of poems deals with “mommy issues” in, hopefully, all the right ways and for all the right reasons! The first of this three-poem cycle is below. Huge gratitude, once again, to The Good Men Project for publishing more of my work, and a big shout out to the fathers everywhere who kept it real for the kids. (Link to these two and all the previous poems here.)
Our Mothers, Whose Art is Heaven
If men ultimately succeed in burning this earth,
all our mothers will weep to drown the fire,
flooding every home and sidewalk and valley
with salted tears, turning a scorched landscape
into an ocean of accord, overwhelming the sea
itself, polluted to death with plastic and poison,
and all living creatures will learn to breathe
underwater, finally becoming formless beings
—a remedial evolution reversing eons wherein
this planet became a waystation for undeveloped
souls—as the sun implodes and the moon grows
numb in darkness, a silent peace holding sway
in the serenity of a deathless, maternal eternity.
Sean Murphy, author of six books, has been publishing fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays for over twenty years. He has appeared in NPR's "All Things Considered", USA Today, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and AdAge. A long-time columnist for PopMatters, his work has also appeared in Salon, The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, The Good Men Project, Memoir Magazine, and more. Sean is Founding Director of 1455, a non-profit that celebrates storytelling.
https://www.bullmurph.com/original-poem-our-mothers-whose-art-is-heaven/
I feel like he tried to write a poem that pc women would approve of. It's too bleak for my taste, and egocentric in some way that bothers me. When I look at the sources that published his work, I imagine he writes, in large part, to please a leftist mindset. This irks me. His poem is political, written from the outside in. It's not bad, just not honest.
Last line implies that deathlessness, where there is no life, is maternal. I don't dig that idea at all. Yet another leftie notion that demeans women.