I’m currently at our family home, where I grew up, visiting my mother. She’s 84 and getting very frail. Mentally, she is all still there. I’m spending some quality time with a person who is my compass and shining light. Always.
"If I had to choose between God and my mother, I'd choose my mother." - Albert Camus
I’ve interviewed my mother often over the years and hope to get time to edit and present the long videos in the important way, they deserve. For her grandchildren and greatgrandchildren, so they may know her as I know her. Kind of like Layton’s so fine poem, For Musia’s Grandchildren. Also, read Layton’s own poem to his mother - Keine Lazarovitch.
I write this poem
for your grandchildren
for they will know of your loveliness
only from hearsay,
from yellowing photographs
spread out on table and sofa
for a laugh.
When arrogant
with the lovely grace you gave their flesh
they regard your dear frail body pityingly,
your time-dishonoured cheeks
pallid and sunken
and those hands
that I have kissed a thousand times
mottled by age
and stroking a grey ringlet into place,
I want them suddenly
to see you as I saw you
— beautiful as the first bird at dawn.
Dearest love, tell them
that I, a crazed poet all his days
who made woman
his ceaseless study and delight,
begged but one boon
in this world of mournful beasts
that are almost human:
to live praising your marvellous eyes
mischief could make glisten
like winter pools at night
or appetite put a fine finish on. It’s strange seeing my mother so frail, so vulnerable. But it is life and she’s doing ok, all considered.
I have so many memories I could share but mostly, it is about her strength of survival. She had such hard times but always kept going ahead and always protecting, and loving us kids, unconditionally. No matter where I’ve traveled in this world, so often alone, not a soul there - I always knew my mother was. And I guess in a nutshell, that is what a mother is. Often when I’m asked “Where you from?” - I’ll retort, “My mother.” and we’ll laugh sharing the inside joke and the glue that connects us all. Me too!
A great exercise for families is to interview each other, interview your grandparents and start a discussion, build an archive. Today I sat down and spent the morning, fire roaring (it’s cold up here, and there is snow!), sat down and interviewed her. It was beautiful, going through life together, flipping the pages of the book we’ve written together. Find the interview below. Here is a template you can use, based on the famous Proust Interview of Vanity Fair.
Hug your mother. If she has passed, hug her still. You can. Mothers are always there, enduring, eternal. Mothers are there, in us.
Mothers
Mothers
remind ourselves
of our true nature -
attached, eternal
a burning, falling star
etching itself upon
the viral template
of our life.
Mothers
a home, a refuge
an embrace,
a place where in forgetting
we fill with
a remembering
until
we sprout life
and the muck
turns green
like it has always been.
Mothers
a womb, a sanctity
where spirits mix
and children yet born
always dance.
Mothers
what lasts
and sings electric
shining what we are
after all
that/before any fall.
Mothers
the last, the first
where no person is cursed
acceptance,
a river that runs us
to the sea
where in being everything
we are again, free.
Mothers