All my children will call me by my moon name and swear allegiance to my wool socks.
Upon rows and rows of spices on hand painted racks will they learn their mothers magic stews and potions.
On tree top forts they will sing Shakespeare and dance Moliere,
They will write stories about the colour of their skin and their grandmothers voice,
As they remember the kindness that shone through her sorrows.
With sticky fingers they will grapple for toys,
Playing away hours and hours of imagination, putting it to the best use it will ever get.
They will remember these times when they are working machines,
When their minds are mined for precious stones, their eyes burnt away at gleaming screens,
Their love withering in the cold air of polite attitudes and insincere speech.
When they dissolve into shiny magazine dreams and magic box ideals,
When they forgo love for comfort and drink coffee picked by enslaved hands,
When shiny quarters and pretty clouds don't mean anything anymore,
When life is like that, they will remember their mother's warmth and her childlike spirit that she instilled in them, hoping they would never lose it.
But here it is, becoming a memory, a memory in days which end too fast and nights that are too long.
It rests somewhere, amid the cold, amid the lost journeys and the roads not taken;
It giggles and waits for a sunny afternoon in the grass, a dog licking at its toes and lemonade on a side table,
sweating in the heat.
---
Early 2011. A personal favourite.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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