For the Mothers

Today is 01-21-2021. I wrote the following poem for my mother a year before she died. I share it today in her honor, and in celebration of mothers everywhere.

 

01-21-2012

 

On this day, my 58^th birthday, I celebrate you, my mother.

 

Birthday celebrations should be for the mothers:

          the mothers who carried us in their

          bodies, close to their hearts,

          connected by blood cord

          severed at birth but never broken.

 

Birthday celebrations should be for the mother

          whose gift of self is total

          in the laboring and birthing

          of a whole and completely other.

 

Birthday celebrations should be for the mother

          whose body I am,

          whose legacy I carry,

          whose tilt of head and lilt of

          laughter

          is choreographed into the

          dance of my life

          and sings in the music of my soul.

 

Birthdays should celebrate the sacrifice of the mother

          and the slow, inexorable

           purification of Love,

          wreaked by pain and tragedy,

          lost dreams and resurrected hopes;

          infants and toddlers and vanished

          childhoods and the rebellious

          heart-break  of  teens.

 

Birthdays should celebrate the mother

          pressed like petals of rose

          that children plucked

           and soaked in the life-giving

          waters of your fidelity:

 

Now

such fragrant anointing

upon our heads

 

Now

such distilled sweetness

emanating from your

Mother heart

         

            

         _Diane Pendola