Mother is a Broken Word | The Pen Lover



Hold your birth giver. Give unto her all the love she has never gotten. Wash her feet with perfume. Pluck the grief out of her eyes. Plant flowers on the wilting places of her heart and whisper poetry to her ears when she is of failing health.

1.
Our mother’s bones are weak,
we marvel in awe at how she
manages to carry a crumbling house
on her back and mould it back together with trembling hands.

2.
When we sit back and grace our
eyes with pictures of her younger years,
when there was still the colour
of vibrant zest in her eyes,
our chests ache with nostalgia;
our eyes become moist with yearning.

3.
Mother smells of spices and smoke,
a lingering scent of of abandoned ambitions,
her hair grey— the evidence that she has sacrificed everything for us;
her weakening eyes—two pools of dreams
she has long forgotten.

Anytime we ask what she
wanted to be when she was younger,
she does not speak,
but we read the look
on her face.

4.
Mother in the kitchen, mother taking care of the baby,
Mother taking care of us, mother dusting the shelves,
Mother screaming at us and we are hurt,
but we do not hear the undertone
and the whisper behind that harshness,
we do not hear the crumbling
and the shattering inside,
we never hear the “I’m so tired”
that she doesn’t say.

5.
Do you regret having us, mom?
Do you wish you never married our father?
Answer us!

6.
Mother gives us trauma
and tries to protect us from father’s
ungodly rage;
Mother’s anger is hideous,
so we try to cover it up with
a plea and a sacrifice of our pride.

Mother is our life; mother is our god,
Mother is not happy; mother is a broken word.

7.
I will never be like mother is what you think,
But we know that apart from the striking resemblance,
you have her anger and her ability to lash out when her mind breaks down,
You bear her pain and she fed you the harshness and bitterness of this world when you were just a new born through her breasts.

About the Pen Lover

The Pen Lover is a young poet, writing therapist and an avid reader who is actually a thousand years old but lives in a young body. She writes about sadness, love and women prowess. When she’s not writing, she’s busy making her WhatsApp status look like a waist bead and scrolling through Pinterest.

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