Posts Tagged ‘motherhood’
when you break thru
Sweetheart
when you break thru
you’ll find
a poet here
not quite what one would choose.
I won’t promise
you’ll never go hungry
or that you won’t be sad
on this gutted
breaking
globe
but I can show you
baby
enough to love
to break your heart
forever
poem: song for baby-o, unborn by diane di prima
image found here
in yourself you stretch
To be in love
Is to touch with a lighter hand.
In yourself you stretch, you are well.
painting: Jenny Saville, Study for Pentimenti I by way of marvelous kiddo
from poem: to be in love by gwendolyn brooks
the tribe was broken
at last we killed the roaches.
mama and me. she sprayed,
i swept the ceiling and they fell
dying onto our shoulders, in our hair
covering us with red. the tribe was broken,
the cooking pots were ours again
and we were glad, such cleanliness was grace
when i was twelve. only for a few nights,
and then not much, my dreams were blood
my hands were blades and it was murder murder
all over the place.
At Last We Killed The Roaches, Lucille Clifton
image via 50 watts: h. c. andersen, medusa, agnete lind picture book, 1854
and this:
In an 1833 letter about da Vinci’s “Medusa” Andersen wrote:
The head had something magic about it that attracted me, the foam of the abyss in its most beautiful form; it is hell that has created a Madonna head, the warm poison streaming out of her mouth; the serpent’s hair is moving while the beholder becomes petrified.
serpent life
mother love
“Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”
— Augustine of Hippo
photo: here from the Irwin Archive courtesy of the Douglas Historical Society, Douglas, Arizona. Early 1900s.
the benefactor
And she told this story: “When I was writing the last pages of ‘The Benefactor,’ I didn’t eat or sleep or change clothes for days. At the very end, I couldn’t even stop to light my own cigarettes. I had David stand by and light them for me while I kept typing.” When she was writing the last pages of “The Benefactor” it was 1962, and David was 10.
She was not a mom. Every once in a while, noticing how dirty David’s glasses were, she’d pluck them from his face and wash them at the kitchen sink. I remember thinking how it was the only momish thing I ever saw her do.
(from here)
just wait for the birth
“You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the the hour of the new clarity.”
~Rainer Maria Rilke
(thank you Leigh – for sharing little M’s birth story once again)
(photo: a father’s view)
to teach
“Oh, I begged my mother to teach me to read. My — my poor mother was a waitress, and did ironing, and had four children.
And I begged her to teach me, and she would come home and labor and try — and do her best. And she did. She taught me to read. And so I — I just devoured every book in sight.”
~patti smith via here
the leash
…
That moment is what I will tell of as proof
that you loved me permanently. After that I was
a woman alone carrying her bag, asking a worker
which direction to walk to find a taxi.
from: Linda Gregg, “Asking for Directions”
(photo: here)
