Sunday, May 12, 2019

MOMMY

The Courage That My Mother Had

The courage that my mother had
Went with her, and is with her still:
Rock from New England quarried;
Now granite in a granite hill.

The golden brooch my mother wore
She left behind for me to wear;
I have no thing I treasure more:
Yet, it is something I could spare.

Oh, if instead she’d left to me
The thing she took into the grave!—
That courage like a rock, which she
Has no more need of, and I have.

-by Edna St. Vincent Millay-

For My Mother

Once more
I summon you
Out of the past
With poignant love,
You who nourished the poet
And the lover.
I see your gray eyes
Looking out to sea
In those Rockport summers,
Keeping a distance
Within the closeness
Which was never intrusive
Opening out
Into the world.
And what I remember
Is how we laughed
Till we cried
Swept into merriment
Especially when times were hard.
And what I remember
Is how you never stopped creating
And how people sent me
Dresses you had designed
With rich embroidery
In brilliant colors
Because they could not bear
To give them away
Or cast them aside.
I summon you now
Not to think of
The ceaseless battle
With pain and ill health,
The frailty and the anguish.
No, today I remember
The creator,
The lion-hearted.


-by May Sarton-

Here She Is

My little 'Mommy' in her Sunday best
with scraped knees and loose socks, posing.
Behind her a Privet Hedge in sweet bloom
So young she could never have seen beyond
this moment, nor imagined
her future unfolding.

 With her sisters Kay and Dorothy Ryan
surrounding her mother Deliah Cunningham Ryan
Lace Curtain Irish to the core

 "Addie"

She grew up, finished high school,
danced through the Jazz age,
fell in love and married
(he was a telephone linesman)

 William James Slater
(He went to school and joined the force, rose through the ranks
and became Chief of Westchester County Parkway Police)
 
They moved from rentals in the Bronx, to Yonkers
and then Larchmont, NY.

She had lost her first born to crib death
and went on to the second.
It was a difficult birth.
She was 31-Dad was 38
.........

Sirens silenced the howling winds.
A bloody trail marked the steps
of a shocked woman rushed
through Emergency to
the operating theater.

An incision of 6 inches was made
through her lower abdomen,
then a second incision
opened her uterus.
I was delivered.

Thus unto this rude world I came.
Elsewhere, my father was
told I was probably dead.
It proved quite untrue
I howled the proof.

The storm raged all night and day.
I was swaddled and held apart.
In recovery, unavailable,
drugged to sleep, my
wounded mother.

What I felt I can not remember,
only imagine the pain of it,
the loneliness and fear
of that brutal welcome
hearing wind howl.

Childhood amnesia veils it all
for many years until one day
a bleeding wound becomes
the memory of something.
Howling confirms it.

This second cut sinks way down,
down to the level of the first,
carries it upward where
it joins the current pain.
Howling's the familiar.

It goes on like that into adolescence,
through adulthood and to old age,
so that every cut of every kind
might call the first to mind,
make a calm wind howl.

("The First Cut"-verses written on my seventy fifth Birthday)
~*~

Anne Adelaide Ryan Slater
 
Seven years after me, she had another child,
William James Jr. in 1950
Then in 1953 came her heart attacks and while recuperating at home, she lost her husband to a sudden Fatal Coronary. We lost our rental house and slept at her sisters home for a month till she was well enough and an apartment was found. She went on into brave widowhood, working to keep her little family alive.
She died at the age of 69 in 1980.
~*~

3 comments:

grace Forrest~Maestas said...

Mommy

Mo Crow said...

(((Michelle))) my Mom is a Ryan too, she'll be 90 this year!

Nancy said...

Oh dear Michelle! The gathering, the telling, the remembering...
xo my friend