POETS’ CORNER: 2 FROM FEELA FOR MOTHER’S DAY

11 May POETS’ CORNER: 2 FROM FEELA FOR MOTHER’S DAY

Editor’s note: My Internet research came up with the history of Mother’s Day.

Mother’s Day was first suggested in 1872 by Julia Ward Howe (who wrote the words to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”) as a day dedicated to peace.

In 1907, Philadelphian Ana Jarvis began a campaign to establish a national Mother’s Day. She persuaded her mother’s church in Grafton, W.V. to celebrate Mother’s Day on the second anniversary of her mother’s death, the second Sunday of May.

After establishing Mother’s Day in Philadelphia, Ana Jarvis and her supporters wrote to ministers, businessman, and politicians around the U.S. promoting the idea of a national Mother’s Day. They were successful, and by 1911 Mother’s Day was celebrated in almost every state. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed Mother’s Day a national holiday.

Some countries, including Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, and Turkey, also celebrate Mother’s Day on the second Sunday of May. But other countries of the world celebrate their own Mother’s Day at different times throughout the year. In the U.K., “Mothering Sunday” is celebrated on the fourth Sunday of Lent. Traditionally on Mothering Sunday, servants were encouraged to spend the day with their mothers, taking a special “mothering cake” as a tribute.

Mothering cakes. Flowers. Chocolate. Things in big boxes. Things in small boxes (even better). Telluride Inside… and Out offers a simple tribute in the form of two poignant poems by our David Feela.

Happy Mother’s Day

*Blue

Just before she died, my mother’s feet
turned blue, a blue that meant her blood refused
to travel the length of her body.

Not the blue of pure starlight
arriving ten million years after its birth
nor the blue of oceans swelling with storm.

Just blue,
the shade that comes with a bruise.
I want to believe the tumor forced her

not to pay attention, that it replaced the part
her brain destroyed, actually invented memories
to run like old films on a tiny screen,

so she had to watch very carefully, the projector
flickering in time with her heart, the theater
filled with blue light.

* From “In the Name of the Mother “(Primal Scream Poets’ Society), a chapbook of poems by David Feela

AND

**Bringing Hannah Home

Above the San Juan River
where a thick brown cord of water
surges through the Four Corners
we carried the dried umbilical cord
mailed all the way from California,
delivered by a stranger’s hand,
and brought it here
for sacred burial.
In a cloth pouch we tossed a pinch
of pollen, a pinch of sand, clay
lifted from those crosshairs
where four states come together,
mixed it all with the piece of Hannah
so she might find this place
though she had never
even to this day touched
these sacred corners.
We laid the pouch in a shallow hole
and heaped the world back in upon her.
Nowhere else could have been any better.
Nowhere else could have brought
her mother home to us too.
We heaped the earth
then pressed it flat,
scratched the letter H twice
on a nearby rock that had
for the last million years
been struggling toward the light.

**Bringing Hannah Home, from “The Home Atlas” (WordTech Editions)