Category: poetry

Sunday Poem: To The “Bad” Mothers by Aaminah Shakur

Left to right: a dog I don’t remember, my mom, me, and my older brother sitting on the stone wall outside the house I grew up in, circa 1972 or 1973.

Let’s face it: Mother’s Day can be problematic. It posits an idyllic relationship where none (or a difficult one) might exist. It pits women against each other in subtle ways (childless? GASP. You must be selfish. Same goes for those women who only have one child. Women with many children are consuming too many resources. Breastfeeding? If you don’t you’re a failure. Disposable diapers are for wasteful mothers who don’t care about the environment. If you don’t make your own baby food you obviously don’t care. Go back to work. Stay home. Do both. Miscarriage? When will you try again? Don’t wait. Too late. And so on).

Here is to everything that is difficult, sacred, horrible, joyous, and beautiful about mothers. Here’s to lifting mothers up; here’s to letting women choose to not be mothers. Here’s to making peace with our mothers and their mothering; here’s to finding people who nurture us every day, mothers or no.

Finally, here’s to the bad mothers. Now, read that like Samuel L. Jackson said it. That’s what I mean.

To the “Bad” Mothers

To the “bad” mothers
Mothers who are told plenty often
all the ways they ruined
everyone’s lives
To the mamas
who kept their kids
worked double shifts
set boundaries
couldn’t buy name brands
didn’t get an X-box
to be told they are bitches
To the moms who had
their kids taken from them
maybe it was the best thing
maybe it was a racist system
set up against them
maybe they were taken away
by drugs or prison
but they tried, they really tried
and every day they think
of what they lost
and hope their child is
better off
To the mothers who gave up
sent their kids away
at birth or after they tried
their very best
either way worried they
would fuck their kids up
more than abandoning them would
who believed someone better
would pick up the pieces
and give everything they
could not
To the “evil” stepmothers
and adoptive mothers
and foster mothers
who will never be enough
because they aren’t
“real”
and can’t explain why the real ones
can’t be there instead
To all the bad mothers out there
who ruin lives
by trying to love
the only way they know how
who save lives without credit
by loving what others
couldn’t be bothered to try
who are just trying to live
themselves
who never get a Mother’s Day card
Today is your day too
every day you are still
a mother
and there are no
perfect mothers

Sunday Poem: A Plagued Journey by Maya Angelou

From Saturday’s morning walk before mouth-breathing runners without masks forced me indoors.

The only ignorance that is bad, I maintain, is that which is willful.

I admit I am ignorant of this poem and only just recently discovered it. I would like to say I am better acquainted with Angelou than I am, but in truth, it seems my education could be described as “white people’s high notes.”

I’d like to remedy that. This one seems fitting for our current time/space.

A Plagued Journey 

There is no warning rattle at the door
nor heavy feet to stomp the foyer boards.
Safe in the dark prison, I know that
light slides over
the fingered work of a toothless
woman in Pakistan.
Happy prints of
an invisible time are illumined.
My mouth agape
rejects the solid air and
lungs hold. The invader takes
direction and
seeps through the plaster walls.
It is at my chamber, entering
the keyhole, pushing
through the padding of the door.
I cannot scream. A bone
of fear clogs my throat.
It is upon me. It is
sunrise, with Hope
its arrogant rider.
My mind, formerly quiescent
in its snug encasement, is strained
to look upon their rapturous visages,
to let them enter even into me.
I am forced
outside myself to
mount the light and ride joined with Hope.

Through all the bright hours
I cling to expectation, until
darkness comes to reclaim me
as its own. Hope fades, day is gone
into its irredeemable place
and I am thrown back into the familiar
bonds of disconsolation.
Gloom crawls around
lapping lasciviously
between my toes, at my ankles,
and it sucks the strands of my
hair. It forgives my heady
fling with Hope. I am
joined again into its
greedy arms.

Maya Angelou

Thursday Links To Love: April 30, 2020

This is the house I grew up in.

This house is where I spent the first few years of my childhood in western Maryland – one room, three floors (if you count the dirt basement), and no hot water. It’s strange to miss a time of life that you don’t remember except through pictures, but there it is. I miss it.

This week’s links are below. As always, hold on to the ones you love, and let the rest go.

Goddamn, Glennon Doyle. Untamed is about as fierce a book as I could ever hope to encounter in pandemic-induced fits of insecurity. On what she was taught as a child versus what she has come to know as an adult: “Good girls aren’t hungry, furious or wild…I understand myself differently now. I was just a caged girl made for wide-open skies. I wasn’t crazy. I was a goddamn cheetah.” And the heart-wrenching question that comes in just the first chapter: “Who was I before I became who the world told me to be?”

Khristian seemed a little judge-y about this, but I loved The New York Times’s guide to meditating outdoors. It is ironic that I am looking at it in bed on my computer screen, and I got a little annoyed that the actually natural rain sounds outside drowned out the NYT’s recorded nature sounds on the video. Sigh.

Speaking of New York, I was reading The New Yorker interview with Tori Amos and clicked on the link for her performance on David Letterman a week after 9/11. Even 19 years later, I can conjure up the horror and grief of that sunny day, and this performance of Tom Waits’s song “Time” is a heartwrenching document of that moment in U.S. history. Not ashamed to admit that I was teary by the end, feeling the fullness of sorrow and gratitude mingling in the memory of my own personal losses, wrapped up with the loss of so many people. It’s in moments like this that I think how far away from each other we have become, and I wonder if we are that far away in reality.

Finally, for all those of you who fancy yourselves writers and want to give poetry a go (or if you’re just interested in the weird ways that words can be strung together), here’s a list of 100 poetic forms and links to what they are. Clogyrnach, anyone?

You’re all goddamn cheetahs; go out and meditate in nature this weekend.

Be well. Wash your hands. Love each other.

Sunday Poem: Dropping Keys by Hafiz

Close up detail of a painting with yellow circle and blue and brown lines
Detail of a finished painting. Dropping keys.

Just and only this small offering today. Goodness.

Dropping Keys

The small woman

Builds cages for everyone

She

Knows.

While the sage,

Who has to duck her head

When the moon is low,

Keeps dropping keys all night long

For the

Beautiful

Rowdy

Prisoners.

 

Be well. Wash your hands. Love each other.

Sunday Poem: Morningtime by Me

Today’s poem is by me and was published by Plainsongs, a journal of Hastings College Press, last summer, 2019.

How optimistic things felt then, how wide open and expansive. This was many years ago, a whole other lifetime.

Sigh.

Morningtime

God, it is beautiful here sometimes.

When the high, hard heat sweeps across the baked pasture grass

To be tucked away at night with the setting sun;

When the first stars blink in the sky,

Light in points jumping off the river;

When the sun returns at dawn,

Shouting down the birds and waking up the lazy ants and bees;

When the rain pours a deluge,

Turning the backyard into a bog

And tattooing a steady rhythm on

The shingles and peeling painted windows;

When the blankets stir beside me

And your hand fumbles through the crumpled sheets for mine,

Quiet as a leap of faith,

In the sleepy pre-day of morningtime –

 

Before the dogs are fed and our girl is awake,

Before the insistent chatter of the alarm,

When I reach across the blankets

To meet your fingers.

 

Be well. Love each other. Wash your hands.