In the land of my birth, today is Mother’s Day. Many years ago,as a Mother’s Day gift, I sent my own mother a poem written on a Donegal beach, contemplating the ocean between us that also was what bound us. Years later when we were putting items into her coffin that poem went with her into the ground.
It is a Sunday and I am not a mother. But I do have a great deal of leisure time to spend with poetry practice. I birth other things. I actually wrote two poems this morning. Somedays it takes a while to get the poetry engine purring. And while we all have biological mothers, let us not forget the one who sustains us ultimately.
Motherland
Some mountains are mothers.
Others are the granny
Having her back while she’s
Labouring hard, panting
Into the birthing stone.
Remember the mother
Distraught, wasted away
When her daughter was snatched,
Held hostage, forced into
An unholy marriage.
There are consequences
Until you give something.
Reparation for wrongs
Done to the motherland.
For she will always
Prevail.
We though, may not.
Copyright 2019 Bee Smith
Body of Water
A spring is the rising well in my heart
fed deep below or far above runoff,
the cascade roaring over the rock face.
Cataracts blinding as one’s salty tears,
create countless burns, brooks, becks streaming.
Rivers form and fork like two legs meeting.
I carry the ocean in my belly.
Even now the old tug and pull of tide
still presides through the moon’s wax and waning.
An ocean bed is still an ocean bed
even when the tide has carried water
far, far out,you still carry the vessel
holding the light in phosphorescent night.
Copyright 2019 Bee Smith
Featured photo ‘the naval of earth’ at Uisneach, Ireland
