These blunt and sun-stained hands

A poem for my mom

Photo by Nick Moore on Unsplash

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I think the seed for this poem was planted one day last year when I was sitting at my kitchen table peeling apples, and looked down to realize I was using the exact same motions I’d seen my mom use a thousand times.

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THINGS MY MOTHER AND I HAVE IN COMMON                         2024


These blunt and sun-stained hands, less soft than steady,
less graceful than strong.

Shoulders broader than you’d think were needed
on a small woman’s frame.

Hair dark as secret earth, with lodes
of silver gleaming in streaks.

These blunt and sun-stained hands, deft with yarn and needles,
with shears and sewing patterns.

Indifference to makeup, beyond a bright red lip.
A taste for chocolate. A thirst for coffee.

A laugh you don’t expect – the joyous shout
that geysers in an endless gasping splutter.

These blunt and sun-stained hands, peeling apples
in the same lithe kitchen dance.

A poison-magical belief
that things unspoken are not true.

A fire-eater’s skill at swallowing in silence
what aims to consume and destroy.

These blunt and sun-stained hands, rested light
on a child’s head, a friend’s shoulder.

Delight in words. An appetite for story.
A flair for mimicry, for comic drama.

A streak of melancholy, stubborn and apparent
as silver in earth-dark hair.

These blunt and sun-stained hands.

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For the record, it was Mom who was deft with shears and sewing patterns, and she wore her red lipstick much oftener than I wear mine, and this poem only hints at the stories that my sisters and I could tell about her. Her life was challenging in some very specific ways while I was growing up, and she died when she was still in her fifties and I wasn’t yet twenty-one; she and I didn’t get a chance to iron out the bits of our relationship that had become fraught and frayed when her hard times and my adolescence collided. Decades later I’m still writing poems about her, looking to remember what was fraught and what can be recalled in comfort, looking to continue a conversation that isn’t finished yet.