My Birthday, My Mother, My Joy

It's my birthday and my thoughts have turned to my mother and that special bond that existed between us from moment one! In my recent chapbook the title poem is "Peach Seeds" and it is about that wonder that was ours. I thought it appropriate to share it here today:


Peach Seeds

She didn't like that I thought I was adopted.
She leaned her face into mine so that we
were eye to eye.
I was the worst pain she'd ever known;
nine hours with complications, having
decided to come along with snow thunder
one early January Kansas night.

She was no more amused when I decided
I was really the reincarnation of an English
princess held captive
by a bevy of sixteenth century dysfunctional nuns.
That I was seven was no excuse
for being ungrateful for who I was
and who I wasn't.

But, by eight she recognized that mine was not
a heretic's soul, nor the musings of a wish-I-was.
By eight she knew I was made up of purple streamers,
silver bells, Northern Lights, tea leaves from Ceylon,
angel hair, wild Palominos, wood nymphs,
peach seeds, shrill whistles
and endless sticky kisses

and she let me take her hand any time
I needed her to travel with me.

We shared worlds and life and love
and us and them, all born from her womb
and his seed that became the incubator
for all the gifts that poured from that
crack in the universe that somehow
God had allowed us
to wiggle through.

She didn't flinch the last time I knelt beside her
to gently remove the clothes she
didn't even know she wore. She trusted my hands
that stroked her thick gray hair and whispered
a tiny prayer and sealed it with a kiss. She didn't
remember as I leaned in and we were once
again eye to eye

that she'd given me life and had stirred, spun,
lifted, launched, released, poured and retrieved,
sailed and thrust it,
with the rhythm of an ocean,
but in that brief moment when her hand grasped
mine, one last time,
I know she knew she would

always have hold of the other end of my
unbreakable purple streamers.




From "Peach Seeds" by Peggy Eldridge-Love published by Mipoesias Chapbook Series