Words

My mother gave me a book of poems she used as an elementary school teacher. “Why?” I asked. “Why not keep them?”

I think her greatest gift to me is books… She was the one who encouraged me to read early. (My father, observing me as a small child looking quietly at books on the couch, would whisper anxiously to my mother, “What’s wrong with her?”) She read me stories as a child. She gave me books at turning points in my life. She’s given me books sometimes when she didn’t feel like she had anything else to give. I understand that now.

This poem, ”Song for my Mother,” written in 1905 by Anna Hempstead Branch, captures some of the value of this gift. In the case of my mother, it was given not through flowery speech but through love of reading. Even so, I think the poem fits. How perfect that it’s in this book she gave me last week, Time for Poetry. It’s also available here, so my understanding is that it’s public domain.

My mother has the prettiest tricks
Of words and words and words.
Her talk comes out as smooth and sleek
As breasts of singing birds.

She shapes her speech all silver fine
Because she loves it so.
And her own eyes begin to shine
To hear her stories grow.

And if she goes to make a call
Or out to take a walk,
We leave our work when she returns
And run to hear her talk.

We had not dreamed these things were so
Of sorrow and of mirth.
Her speech is as a thousand eyes
Through which we see the earth.

God wove a web of loveliness,
Of clouds and stars and birds,
But made not anything at all
So beautiful as words.

They shine around our simple earth
With golden shadowings,
And every common thing they touch
Is exquisite with wings.

There’s nothing poor and nothing small
But is made fair with them.
They are the hands of living faith
That touch the garment’s hem.

They are as fair as bloom or air,
They shine like any star,
And I am rich who learned from her
How beautiful they are.

This week, when my children are sick with respiratory yuck, my daughter requested “that poem you were reading downstairs about the little girl who was sick in bed, and played with toys.”

“You mean, ‘The Land of Counterpane’?” I asked.

“Yes,” she nodded. “That would be a good one for today.”

Dare I hope the inheritance is passing on to the next generation?