Today we honor the people who have loved and cared for us. Sometimes that is a birth Mom, a Mom who adopted us, and sometimes it a Free Mom hug from a mother from our family of choice.
I love how this poem lifts the many lives that many of us live before we are mom’s and the lives we live when our children become parents to their own children. I love my Mom and the resilience she planted in me. Steady and strong. I also love the many intergenerational friends who have mentored and cared for me. Listened, saw me, helped me to believe in myself.
“I want to honor the silent ceremony between mother and daughter.” I want to be the silence that language cannot contain - and pay attention to the stories yet to be born.
Happy Mother’s Day to ALL!
We Host These Variables by Jasmine Mans
We try to leverage language as a means to a truth. We
learn, on our paths, perhaps, that certain stories have no
language, nor require one. There’s something I want to
honor here. I want to honor the silent story, the
emotions unaccompanied by human language. I want to
honor the weight of the stillness. I want to honor the
silent ceremony between mother and daughter. A
ceremony of blood and becoming. Because, I know, we
exist with a heavy and stubborn resemblance. I know
the distance between mother and daughter. How we are
many burned bridges, as well as, a wealth of brick and
clay, ready to be made anew from everything unmade of
us. I am learning my mother’s song, staring into her
silence, as it stares back at me. Wondering of its depth,
and wandering through it. I don’t know all of her pain,
or if it can be held with two hands. But she looks back
at me, with girlish eyes, wanting to be remembered for
something I do not recognize her as. Daughters have
questions for their mothers, questions made up of no
words; we host these variables. A woman stretched her
body for me, and I have no words to describe her in
wholeness, but without shame, I want you to know her.
My mother.
by Jasmine Mans from Black Girl, Call Home p. 12
Invitation: “… I want to honor …”
Jasmine Mans is a Black American author and CEO of Buy Weed From Women. Her poetry book, BLACK GIRL, CALL HOME (Penguin Random House) has been named one of Oprah’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books, Essence’s #1 Contemporary Black Poet To Know and has won the Stonewall Book Award, Best Poetry By The American Library Association Black Caucus, and Best Book Cover 2021.
Jasmine has contributed to The 1619 Project Book as a poet, and most recently collaborated with the Brooklyn Ballet on original performance piece at the prestigious Brooklyn Academy of Music. Mans co-hosted The Kennedy Center’s Arts Across America digital series alongside renowned poet, Jason Reynolds. Jasmine’s voice can currently be heard as the voice of Ulta Beauty’s national “Muse” campaign.
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May Courageous Citizen
Doris “Granny D” Haddock
“Just as an unbalanced mind can accumulate mental stresses that can grow and take on a life of their own, so little decisions of our modern life can accumulate to the point where our society finds itself bombing other people for their oil, or supporting dictators who torture whole populations—all so that our unbalanced interests might be served.”
For all of the Mothers within Circles of Courageous Commons, particularly the founders, Pat and Jean, and Christine and all... May all of you be surrounded by Love today.
I am reflecting upon Jasmine Mans' poem and and this line: :I am learning my mother’s song, staring into her silence, as it stares back at me."