Tag Archives: what I’d like to tell my mother

Sneaking Up On the Muse

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Sneaking Up On the Muse

My verses are not perfect. I’m no Dickinson or Byron.
My words are rough and crumpled, in need of a hot iron.
My reasoning is stifled, obscured by feeble brain.
I often have to write a line again and then again.
My successful lines are stealthy. They just creep up on me,
perhaps because my muses hang around insistently.
If I could take a stealthie, perhaps you’d see one hovering
there over my shoulder, inspiring and mothering.
In short, on those occasions when my inspiration’s slight,
and I cannot find a poem, likely my muses might!

Words of the day are stealthie, slight, rumpled, stifle and iron.

(A stealthie is defined as a picture taken by someone, usually a girl, that is clearly a selfie but contains a cute animal or object of interest in order to curb the backlash of it being a selfie, or a picture taken without the subject’s knowledge, especially using a smartphone. Retrieved from “https://en.wiktionary.org/ and the Urban Dictionary. This imaginary stealthie is of my mother, hovering over my left shoulder. She was my first inspiration and conspirator  in rhyme and still, it is her voice I hear every time I write a rhymed poem.)

Mum’s the Word

If you’ve read my posts on Africa, you already know more about me than my mom ever did.  Once, years later, when I asked my mom if she would like to know the full story about why I stayed in Africa instead of traveling with my sister when she came to visit me and then coming back to the U.S. with her, my mother said, “I never told my mother anything that would make her feel bad.”  Case closed.

There was a whole part of my life my mother never knew about by choice.  She never knew that I was nearly killed twice while I was there, or that I initially stayed because I was in love with an Ethiopian man.  My sister knew all because she was there when the shooting took place, and I had told her about the kidnapping, but she never told my mother.  In many other ways, I am very like my mother, but there are some other genes surging through me, because I always want to know everything and I will almost always ask for the “rest” of the story.

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Dear Mom.”: Write a letter to your mom.  Tell her something you’ve always wanted to say, but haven’t been able to.