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Write Your Mother A Poem

Write Your Mother A Poem

Within this Thread you can write a Poem to your Mother...

Poem Mother Write

LINGERING JUVENILITY

Reading about the death of the father of poet Les Murray and how that death freed Murray from juvenility made me ponder my own freeing and not-so-freeing in relation to my father and my mother. It made me ponder the very nature of adulthood and my success and lack of it thusfar. I dedicate this little piece of reflection to my dear mother who died some 30 years ago -Ron Price with thanks to Les Murray: A Life in Progress, Oxford UP, 2000, p.265.


I think his death1 freed me

from any lingering juvenility,

although I think I went on

hankering after it for years.2


I always seemed to need

a mother or was that just

my wife's perception?

I hope I never find out---

for sure.


Adulthood rushed at me

or was it just my hormones,

or civilization's tornados?

Perhaps the rush was from

that evening when I first

felt firm warm breasts

under a star-studded sky

and bra beside a lake

in northern Ontario

just after I turned 18.


Whatever------I've been

the serious one just about

as far back as I remember,

even when the Kingdom of God

on earth began in 1953. I was nine

and I played third base that summer

in the Burlington softball league for

pre-peewees and my dad's voice

boomed through the house in the

evening, filling me with fear.


And now my son has little fear

of me and I have tried to make

it so---down in the Antipodes after

fifty years of trying to catch the ball.

1 My father's: 1895 to 1965
2 Even went to dances by myself as late as the age of forty in Katherine, after I had been married for fifteen years.

Ron Price
16 March 2002
(updated for International Discussions
21/10/07)

Edited: RonPrice on 21st Oct, 2007 - 2:54am