Make Way for Mothers

I almost titled this "Make Way for Mucklings," a bit of goofy humor my mother would expect from me, but I stuck with "Make Way for Mothers," as I am getting ready for Mother's Day by 1) buying a pertinent (you'll see just how pertinent soon, Mom!) card 2) posting a poetry feature at Escape Into Life about mothers and 3) staring at my gardens to see what I'll need to get at the big Kiwanis Mother's Day Flower Sale (Thursday through Sunday, brainchild of my dear old dad!).

The EIL poems explore all kinds of mother issues, but not really the conventional. There is a place for cheery, sentimental, rhyming, greeting-card verse on Mother's Day, and that place is a greeting card. (Although the one you'll get is currently blank, Mom. I do hope to fill it in with lovey-dovey but probably not rhyming words.) At EIL, you'll see poets handle grief, rage, the choice to be or not to be a mother, and the choice to stick around. I confess I walked out the back door once, frustrated by mothering, but it was only to walk around the block for fresh air and to blow off steam. Literal steam, from boiling rice... (And the kid was safe, and supervised, but only after my desperate, frustrated, repeated efforts to get the two men in the house, who were not cooking, to watch the toddler. Sigh... Steam...) Anyhoo!

The fabulous poems are by Yvonne Zipter, Sarah J. Sloat, Sandy Longhorn, Martha Silano, and Molly Spencer. I hope you'll go read them. The fabulous art is by Michael Parkes.

My mom had a duck nesting next to the house, with five eggs in the nest, as of two days ago. Alas! Raccoons? Possums? Crows? Above, swans!

Is this a griffin?

And, to make it a Random Coinciday in the blog, the clerk in the shop where I got the Mother's Day card raved and raved about how much she loved News That Stays News: Sustaining Our World Through Poetry, our recent local reading of poems based on the news, sponsored by The Parret Endowment, a bequest from Margaret Parret, who used to read poetry out loud with my mother!