for my mother
Because you are the morning song,
I sing dawn into the sleepy room.
Because you are a prayer,
I have psalms for hands, vespers for feet,
and there is holiness in the spatula,
devotion in the chair,
faith in sirens, in old vases.
If there are cranberries in my thoughts,
it is because you are the sugar
that taught them not to be afraid
of their own sharpness.
And the white and red petunias
that flutter inside my hope
are there because you planted them
decades ago.
I didn’t know all these years
that I was being made—
but because you are the abacus
I am the calculus of possibility.
Because you are the basket
I’ve learned to weave.
Holy wow. Such an evocative and lushly beautiful ode to your mom. Love that you used abacus—and you even rhymed/paired/mirrored it in the next line, with calculus. (Such metaphors, those two.)
I look forward to seeing this included in your next book of poems. (Please?)
thanks for this sweet response to mom’s poem–i was actually very happy about the abacus/calculus line. We are both math lovers. And yeah, I am thinking of a book of parenting poems, and perhaps daughtering poems are in there, too …