Mother's Day 2017

I am a tree

     Strong limbed and deeply rooted

     My fruit is bittersweet

     I am your mother

~from “Trees” by Walter Dean Myers

Oh, if instead she’d left to me

     The thing she took into the grave!—

     That courage like a rock, which she

     Has no more need of, and I have.

~from “The courage that my mother had” by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I want my conscience to be

     true before you;

     want to describe myself like a picture I observed

     for a long time, one close up,

     like a new word I learned and embraced,

     like the everday jug,

     like my mother’s face,

     like a ship that carried me along

     through the deadliest storm.

~from “I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone” by Rainer Maria Rilke