Here's to moms.
Here's to those moms without enough health care, to moms with enough
health care. Here's to elitist moms and working white and black and in-
between moms. Here's to egghead moms. Here's to non-egghead moms.
Here's to moms that cooks eggs for their kids and moms who don't. Here's
to moms who kind of annoy their kidlets, and here's to moms who don't.
Here's a wish for all the mothers in the world right now that our children
will be safe, even as so many of them aren't safe--from Myanmar to Iraq
to Darfur to the hungry children in our country. Here's to whomever is
working to help those children and those moms be safe. Dads, too.
Here's to my mom.
A war bride who didn't get the best lot in life, but always gave us unconditional
love.
(My poem about that)
War Bride
My mother suns on the rocks at South-End-On-Sea,
her bare shoulders a pale muslin bordering the wild
moss rose and leaves growing
to the heart-shaped bodice.
Head tossed back in laughter, hair
careless in the salt breeze, hands
clasped around one raised knee, she
could be a movie star, her bedroom
eyes daring anyone
to take her up on the beauty.
I cross forty years to meet this stranger,
to share the easy grace
so quietly buried
before her children grow old enough
to recognize its loss.
I could befriend her,
gain her confidence to talk,
woman-to-woman,
about the distance, the misleading charm
of khaki and leather, the heartlessly blue
eyes of the man, so simple to fall into, but
so common, really, in the States--not
worth the rough passage over, I might say,
or the risk.
We could take tea in her winter
home in Luton together,
while the pilot flies off into the dusk, jamming
radar in the clouds above Alsace,
a pin-up of my mother coming-on to him
from the frosting metal of the cockpit door.
Here's to my mom and auntie always loving all the little kidlets
when the kidlets hang with them.
Here's to moms.
Unconditional love isn't the worst thing in the world, is it?