Happy Mother's Day to all the world' s Mothers. Bless you for all the love, time and energy that you give to your children and to the world.
Invisible Work
Because
no one could ever praise me enough,
because I don't mean these
poems only
but the unseen
unbelievable effort it takes to
live
the life that goes on between them,
I think all the
time about invisible work.
About the young mother on Welfare
I
interviewed years ago,
who said, "It's hard.
You bring
him to the park,
run rings around yourself keeping him safe,
cut
hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner,
and there's no
one
to say what a good job you're doing,
how you were
patient and loving
for the thousandth time even though you had a
headache."
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for
myself
because I am lonely,
when all the while,
as the
Chippewa poem says, I am being carried
by great winds across the
sky,
thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world
day and night,
the slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the
way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can
breathe
and bees ransack this world into being,
while owls
and poets stalk shadows,
our loneliest labors under the moon.
There
are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother
too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have
stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment,
against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my
heart
is the work of the world's heart.
There is no other
art.
~ Alison Luterman ~
( The Largest Possible Life )
You can find this essay and others on The Power of Story at my substack:
(Article changed on May 10, 2024 at 5:36 PM EDT)
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