Mothering In Real Time

I don’t know how you do it,
Mothering in real time

Between Budget meetings and
Committee meetings and
Leadership meetings and
Board meetings and
Volunteer meetings and
Volunteer meetings and
Volunteer meetings…
You manage to
Listen and
Counsel and
Organize and
Discuss and
Attend and
Advise and
Be a friend to so many and
Most of all love…

Mothering in real time
Is what you do
And we would be lost without you

I don’t miss you every day

I didn’t when you were alive

Our relationship wasn’t like that

I do think of you sometimes…

When I make spaghetti sauce
When I listen to gospel music
When I defend unborn life

When I hear a particular twang in someone’s voice
When I smell the desert sage
When a preacher is filled with the Holy Ghost

When Blacks and Whites harmonize
and bring together the best of both cultures
I think of you

When my kids sing
When the music is loud
I see your thumbprint on their souls

There’s
Tamale pie
Pork ‘n Beans
Jiffy Cornbread
and Collard Greens
With the extra bit of salt
The dash of heat
The reserved bacon fat
I gift your flavors to the future

It’s been ten years and
I don’t think of you always
but when I do

You are there

Rumbling tumbling
Spinning twisting
Ideas are socks in my clothes dryer mind
Some emerging fresh and new
Some lost to that forever place where socks
and apparently ideas
go

Anathema: Cursed by Ecclesiastical Authority

She blamed me for her excommunication
She blamed me for her banishment
She blamed me for her ostracization
She blamed me for her condemnation
She blamed me for her fear
She blamed me for her shame
She blamed me for her loneliness disgrace humiliation suffering
She blamed me for her pain
She blamed me for her agony
She blamed me for her dishonor
She blamed me for her punishment
She blamed me for her tribulation
She blamed me for her immolation

My name is Anathema.
She is my mother

His grapefruit-shaped head was just visible above the elephant grass; an ideal target for enemy snipers.
Rainy season bathed the area with an intoxicating petrichor,
inviting him to forget the danger... for a moment.
The new medication caused his genuphobia to subside, but thoughts of knees, terrible horrible knees, still stalked his mind.
Would he live to see his birthday tomorrow?
The fates were ambiguous

I hope
That in the end
I've made your life better

I failed you and you and you and you and you
I let you and you and you and you down
I disappointed you and you and you and you
I was hurtful to you and you and you
I lied to you and you and you and you and you and you
I cannot fix these things.
I can only apologize