adventures in home-making

"The Mother" by Gwendolyn Brooks.

Abortions will not let you forget.

You remember the children you got that you did not get,

The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,

The singers and workers that never handled the air.

You will never neglect or beat

Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.

You will never wind up the sucking-thumb

Or scuttle off ghosts that come.

You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,

Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed

children.

I have contracted. I have eased

My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.

I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized

Your luck

And your lives from your unfinished reach,

If I stole your births and your names,

Your straight baby tears and your games,

Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,

and your deaths,

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,

Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.

Though why should I whine,

Whine that the crime was other than mine?--

Since anyhow you are dead.

Or rather, or instead,

You were never made.

But that too, I am afraid,

Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?

You were born, you had body, you died.

It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.

Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you

All.

"Spring is perhaps like a hand" by e. e. cummings.

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

"On The Death Of Smet-Smet, The Hippopotamus- Goddess" by Rupert Brooke.

Song of a tribe of the ancient Egyptians

     (The Priests within the Temple)
She was wrinkled and huge and hideous?  She was our Mother.
She was lustful and lewd? -- but a God; we had none other.
In the day She was hidden and dumb, but at nightfall moaned in the shade;
We shuddered and gave Her Her will in the darkness; we were afraid.

     (The People without)
          She sent us pain,
           And we bowed before Her;
          She smiled again
           And bade us adore Her.
          She solaced our woe
           And soothed our sighing;
          And what shall we do
           Now God is dying?

     (The Priests within)
She was hungry and ate our children; -- how should we stay Her?
She took our young men and our maidens; -- ours to obey Her.
We were loathed and mocked and reviled of all nations; that was our pride.
She fed us, protected us, loved us, and killed us; now She has died.

     (The People without)
          She was so strong;
           But death is stronger.
          She ruled us long;
           But Time is longer.
          She solaced our woe
           And soothed our sighing;
          And what shall we do
           Now God is dying?

A fistful of poems for Friday.

• "Louder Than A Clap of Thunder" by Jack Prelusky (Audio version read by author)
• "Tributaries" by Louise Gluck
• "Like A Prisoner of Soft Words" by C.D. Wright
• "A Daughter of Eve" by Christina Rossetti
• "Introduction to Poetry" by Billy Collins
• "Lines" by Martha Collins
• "Summer In A Small Town" by Linda Gregg
• "To My Dear and Loving Husband" by Anne Bradstreet
• "After Love" by Sara Teasdale
• "Father's Song" by Gregory Orr
• "A Prayer for My Daughter" by W.B. Yeats

The poem my mother paid us $5 to memorize and recite.

Because every day that passes only teaches me how right she was about so many things, and how her love is for me and my sister is boundless...

"IF" BY RUDYARD KIPLING

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise.

If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools.

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them... 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son.

From Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.