Mothers, poetry, pictures and ...

My Mom.

I draw her at least once a year.  I improve. My eye sight doesn't.

All her pictures are smiling ones.
Can't get the glasses the same on both sides - but I think I finally found that smile enough for this year.  The picture is unfinished.  I need to work on the glasses - they are not that white and I need to finish the background.

The less I see more I realise who my mother was.

She was a softy.  She laughed easily.  She told lovely remember when stories. We loved watching movies together. If we didn't cry, it wasn't that much of a movie.  Love stories were big in my youth. On some level we didn't get on very well. At least that is what I thought.

I only realized this week how my dramatic life affected her.

Here is a letter I found today ...

Dear Mrs ...Your sketch of .... nearly out poems your poetry in its intensity - in its focused effect.

Your paintings have enchantment of colour and love.

I felt your poems on Violence (tears my threaded tapestry of words ~~~~ Silence)and "Dead Roses" more clearly than your anguished poems that I'm too guilty to want to read too much.

Retrospectively, "The Clown after the circus has closed" is perhaps too you, and the irony of "Warrior Wonderful" is quite crushing.  "What happened to the dreams we had?" is a poignant lament - I felt shivers there along my own rememberings.

Your poems are inciteful and often captivating and yours is a mind not content with a quiet sea. You are for turbulence - troughs and crests - perhaps a few more crests!

Perhaps your introductory piece reflects best your talent.
It is personalized and abstract together.
It is tantalizingly diffuse.
I disagree about you not counting. 
You tangibly touched somewhere me.

If you're in "The Shadow-lands" come out into "The Sunshine" (if you can, if you dare).It's dangerously bright and you might get burnt.  But you'll live unjamed up ~ densely focused, deeply imaged, sparkling (although it is true that shade and shadow need expression too.)

Ends

My children had an "elderly" English teacher. A real British gentleman. A famous enough one at that and so I won't give his name.  I met him at a child's concert practice.

""What do you do Mrs ...?" He asked.

Not wanting to appear a total fool, being as I was unemployed at the time, and for the sake of the children, I said, without a moment's thought, not entirely a lie really, but still ...

"Oh, I draw and write a bit of poetry..."

Trusted that would suffice, looked away and smiled at the children

"May I read some of your work?  And, I'd like to see some of your drawings..." he said.

My innards went haywire.

"Um... well ... alright.  I'm not really all that good... I don't think my stuff counts for much," I said.

"Still, if you will..." he said.

"Okay ..."

I went home and wrote about twenty poems in a few days, drew a few pictures, collected from my stash a couple of the better ones and presented them at our next encounter.

He liked my children, being as they are delightful girls and then, pure pretty with innocence. He made them fall in love with words; English was their most favourite class and I suppose he wanted to know who their mother was.

I still have the poems and the picture he remarked on.   I haven't looked at them in ages.  I will have to do that now.  

But, as you can see from the titles, my life was full of the stuff that affects the soul, makes it uncomfortable, causes a raucousness in the mind and, and, and  ...  

If I were my child I would have been frightened for me.  I was fine, of course, strong and able, took most of it on the chin at the time.  It is only now that my soul has traveled through those valleys and up those mountains that I feel tender and bruised ~ soul wise.

Mommy Dearest ~ if you can hear me ... I am sorry.  

And, to the gentleman in question - you may be with Mom now or just charming somewhere in England.  When I found your notes on my work and a few other letters today I was so cheered.

To quote from something you wrote about our friendship ...

"Perhaps we will swim in fields of flowers, on waves of breeze tossed grasses, in deep symphonic rememberings and recall low-hummed landscaped murmurings pulsed in visions, dream-lived, and feel warm candle-lighted languid ecstasies echoing beneath time's slender embrace, ...  "

Perhaps ...

We were both in love with words.  I think that letter was composed thinking mostly of the next life or the after-life because I had long left town and he had left the country.  The other children complained about his teaching methods and missed out on the most gratifying class, but he did demand a love for the language, I suppose.  He longed for a world in which he could swim in fields of flowers and listen to the beat of earth's heart in forests and next to lakes where he often walked alone in search of time's slender embrace.

Jesus save you and bless you.