Mother's Day Post

Preface:

I’m the son I fear to raise.

The first poem I ever wrote, all of 5 years old, was to my mother. We were the poorest family in the neighborhood, but happy, so the poem spoke of flowers and puppies and endless, sunny fields.

This has always been a difficult time of year.

I gave up poetry years ago, trading in that old anthology for journal notes, lost counseling sessions. And tickets to faraway lands. I could string my Christmas tree with train stubs alone.

This weekend Katie asked me to participate in a Mother’s Day event. For each comment, we will each make donations to a specified charity. I have chosen this organization, as a way of returning a gift to a very dear friend. But I would hope you would also find it fitting to leave comments over here, as well.

When it was lightning-sparked, mass of single cells, and splitting in primordial seas, perhaps one came too close to those oxygen-enriched rays, and forgot life’s formula for solitary conferment. Until blinded, intoxicated, unsteady, collided into another, so that the secret was shared. Nature’s first conspiracy. Our first true child, an image of co-creators. A trinity, of the father, the son and a mother.

Mankind’s day, moment of shared secrets, whether stolen or coerced. A missed opportunity, I think, the lost chance for peace. But there is both God and Heaven in the newborn cries. I’ve heard husband reduced to silence when bearing witness to those delivery room cries, or perhaps lost ascension to a throne that should now be shared.

I came thus, they think, their wives bowed under pain, the oldest of covenants. I came thus, they faint, sometimes, the light of energy bares every dark corner of the room. I came thus, they even cry, salt water in the corners of their eyes, no different from that first sea of consecration. I came thus, and they often forget, or ashamed, and strike out against both the secret and the alibi.

What have I done?

Not life, an art yet mastered by single cells, where division remains the only path to creating life in one’s own image.

But something more, some impossible burden, an agreement. And one not so easily torn.