“There is no substitute for the intimacy of a handwritten note, no gift as singular as words carefully considered and chosen.”
Have you chosen your Mother’s Day card(s) yet? Think you might want to do something a little more personal to express your feelings?
With Mother’s Day just a few days away I wanted to share this resources from Poet’s.org. Here you can find the right words to say to your mother for Mother’s Day with this selection of meaningful lines you can share in your own personalized, poetic greeting to make this mother’s day a little more meaningful.
In fact,”the impulse to personalize correspondence is evident in the custom to sign letters by hand, even when the rest is typed. Like a fingerprint, handwriting can identify its owner; even mood and intention can be revealed in the bends and crosses of letters, hidden in the slant of cursive.
In her poem “Consider the Hands that Write This Letter,” Aracelis Girmay describes the act of writing: “The left palm pressed flat against the paper, / as it has done before, over my heart, /in peace or reverence / to the sea or some beautiful thing.” My mother who died more than a year of tears ago and was wont to say that “every day was mother’s day” was crushed and more than a little bitter about the one time I didn’t send a card. So please learn from my mistake and send a card, even if it’s late. The time you take now to imprint your love and feelings of appreciation mean more than money can buy.
When we lose something the natural thing is to want to replace it. When your mother dies, no such fix is possible. As much as others can fill in there is just no substitute for the real thing. What I have found since my mom died last March is that locating within myself a good mother who thinks of and treats me like her cherished child is one of the most important ways to address the grief, as well as my health. Developing this way of relating to my needs has freed up my inner child and creativity. This kindness was the look in my mother’s eyes as she nurses a tiny tiny me in the rocking chair. The same chair in which she later sat reading me many books of poetry and prose.
Even though my mother died in 2016, I felt that in many ways I lost her long before that. It was not to Alzheimer’s or Dementia. We were spared that but others dear to me haven’t been and it has made me even more sensitive to those going through this painful situation. So when I read I Lost My Mother At Bloomingdales, the first poem in Kim Dower’s Slice of Moon, my heart ached to the bone…And that ending. I almost didn’t include here because it so sad… But then I realized that the poem does what poems do best. Take something too awful to bear and use it to create Poetry which like Beauty is a kind of communion. A language heard in the heart that uplifts and reminds us, we are not, alone.
