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 |   entries for the contest Defining Poetry |
| Mama Song For Helen Burak Salopek Strange how I am mama haunted. Thirty years after your death I catch the scent of cigarettes, their bitter, acrid incense carries me home to the SouthSide a room on the second floor all painful sharp edges removed like magic. The rotten parts of memory scoured by nature and time leave a bleached, beautiful carcass. All my wounds are thin white scars. I've passed the age when you went mad. I've passed the age at which you died. I've passed into middle age by magic. You sat and rocked and stared and smoked the day JFK was shot, the Beatles came to Pittsburgh, my college graduation day. In the pictures from my wedding you sit and rock and stare and smoke. I learned to mother myself with magic. The Magdalene's bones, displayed again, exude a holy perfume like the balm of sweet woodsy smoke censered at your funeral Mass. Each day I breathe ten thousand times odors swirl, coil, enter my body. How is it I smell only you, this magic. Written for:
Allen Ginsburg's poem "Kaddish"---a tribute to his mother begins with the lines, "strange now to think of you". That is where I started with my poem, also a tribute to my mother. The ending phrase of the portion featured: the soul, in us, alas, offering itself in sacrifice to change's fierce hunger--hair and teeth--and the roar of bonepain, skull bare, break rib, rot-skin, braintricked Implacability. His description of the soul offering itself in response to the inevitability of life spoke deeply to my soul. Like Ginsberg I had a mother who lived with madness. I believe it has made me aware of life's fragility and the need to bring kindness and civility to our world. I believe it has made me a woman that believes in magic----the magic that is inherent in everyday life. All three of this week's featured poets, Ginsberg, Walt Whitman and Derek Walcott are abundantly aware of this energy and this magic. I think it is no coincidence that all three poets were/are well-known in their own times and were political activists and often considered to be revolutionaries. Revolutionaries and magicians of the soul. |
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