WI: The Promise

This began as a poem I wrote for my husband on Valentine's Day quite a few years ago. My brother, who is a composer, needed lyrics for a Mother's Day piece he was writing. So I did a little revising of the original, and this is the result. I wish you could hear the music that accompanies the words--like a lullaby, like being rocked in a boat (or a cradle, or a rocking chair), in a beautiful haunting minor key:

Because I did not know
'til now the depths of me,
and heights I never saw, until
the traces of my childhood lost
bore witness how my mother gave to me
the world in infant hands...
a star, a ship, a tree.

Now I lift my hand
and call upon her name.
"Mother, it is I. Your gift
so dearly held, was not given in vain!"
Because I know this now,
I give you back the world you gave to me:
the sky, and seas, unbound and limitless,

and never small again.

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Photo: My mother and my brother, circa 1933
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