April 14 Poetry: Mother of Peace. Mary. Motherhood. Women.

This Catholic woman (me) loves a nice reference to Mary (the mother of Jesus).   I also spent much of my weekend with 1100 Catholic woman (about 500 more were non-Catholics) so I am feeling a sense of how we are all interconnected as people- and moroever as women! 

Here's a good one from a poet named Martha Silano from her book Blue Positive.  It's a great collection about pregnancy, childbirth, childraising, and the poetic crazy of it all!

Mother of Peace

but no quiet—

Puccini, Patsy Cline

Some Enchanted Evening

effervescing from unstoppable lips

the unpieced quilt—

Texas Trouble

tabled twenty years

as she presses her foot to the Singer’s pedal, inching along

the rickrack of a hooded dress

while I doze on the bed,

intermittent surges stirring.

Mother of wisdom—

vinegar/lemon in lieu of Windex,

jelly most un-petroleum.

Matriarch of markets—

resurrecting last week’s beets,

overseer of kugel, kapusta, kale.

Queen of tooth-chipping

biscotti, triple baked.

Mother of pizzicato

and pasta, the war

against throw away.

Resilient reassure,

religiously renegade,

refuser of old age.

Little red hen gone global.

Teeny tiny woman with her teeny tine bone

shirking her osteo-hunch. Woman who lived

in the pastel-pink, snakeskin pump

Mother of right the moon and don’t you dare,

I’ll give yas and so’s your Aunt Lizzies,

serving, on Easter, all Arkansas,

then cracking hickories for the Christmas loaf,

clues to the Sunday puzzle, digging around

for the root of nasturtium, the why

of Silano. Mother of peace

but no quiet. Dress

I wriggled into,

never took off.

-Martha Silano

from:

Silano, Martha. Blue Positve (Steel Toe Books, Bowling Green, KY: 2006) page 11.

With Mother is you? Which of the mothers here are the mothers around you?