image from unsplash
Mother
Mother is world, chaos.
Mother is whirlwind of love and comfort and chastisement,
all at once lovely and terrifying.
Mother is mouth open wide with laughter and shouts of battle cry deliverance.
Mother is disdain at my nakedness,
mother is monster with eyes charged live
with contempt at smallness,
mother is muffled tears behind closed doors over drowned years of suffocating pain,
mother is perseverance and collapse,
I, a grown man, run around this world with an umbilical cord tied to her lap,
Chair board meetings with her eyes in the shadows,
See glints of her wild smile in my daughter’s folly.
Mother is all at once swallowing ocean and frightened suricate in the corner of a desert somewhere,
Forever nesting and alert,
…. surrogating the dreams of her own mother.