AN ORDINARY WOMAN    
 
My  mother  is an ordinary woman.
Like other women,
she's been someone's wife.
Like other  women, she's known pain,
but again and again,
when bad times battered down the door,
she'd look for better climes.

I learnt from her
that sorrows grow where joy is overthrown,
but she taught me also
that the sands of life when trouble-heated,
can glow to glass.
And as my childhood passed,
she began to give me, 
white as sun-bleached bones,
round and red-veined,
stones, lying soundless, but assured
in the palm of my hand.
At first I didn't know 
what she was trying to show me,
but as I grow into my  past,
I think I begin to understand.
I feel those stones
anchoring me to the core of women
who've endured all.

My mother, maybe unwittingly, 
but with ancient wisdom,
provided me my own primal symbol,
a forgotten talisman with access to ritual  -
she thinks she failed to 
help me find religion,
but she helped to set me free;
with a stone picked from the road,
she somehow conjured bone and blood.

My mother's an extraordinary mortal.
When the ignorant one's tore off her wings
and thought they'd stolen flight,
she caressed her scars,
and wingless, flew.
They pulled the noose tight,
thinking to still her voice,
but listen at dusk
to the rattling of stones
and you'll see a woman
leap these roof-tops.
There's proof -
my mother's voice is ringing in my blood -
they'll never stop her singing.

My mother's an ordinary mortal,
extraordinarily.
She taught me what she knew...
lessons of pain and impermanence,
untiring resilience and rebirth
and she gave me, too,
a capacity  for resounding mirth.

She may not know just what she's worth,
but if I have my way,
one day, like her,
I, too, will grow to be 
an ordinary woman,

extraordinarily...
   

image and text © sass

time travel / midsummer madness / an ordinary woman / snake / infernal youth / air / ifs & but / heaven-sent / postcard from the ledge / cartwheels / thoughts after an accident / fall / drugstore poem / sweeping the deck / self, indulging / sterling sylvia / cultivated silence / phoenix - survivor poems / poem index