Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Radiance - a poem dedicated to my mom

My 85 year old mom is very sick right now. She will get an MRI on Friday, which hopefully will push medical personnel to figure out what she has.

With this in mind, I print/reprint a poem that is supposed to appear in Fat Poets Speak (2);  Living and Loving Fatly. (Copyright Frannie Zellman, 2013)




Frannie Zellman

Radiance                                                                      To My Mother

Plump and radiant,
You adored them all
With your eyes.
Flowers in your hair,
You twirled your fan
From admirer to admirer
And led the boys
A merry dance
As you jumped from one
To the other
And winked at some
You didn’t care to know.

One summer morning
You raised your arms
And yawned
Into being
Another crop of young men
To appraise
To render helpless
In your presence
Turning, Circe-like,
humans
Into sea swine
Who lost their speech
And instead
Could only make raw, rasping sounds
Of love.

Tiny, thin now,
You stay beautiful
Not just in memory
But in the eyes of those
Who meet your eyes
And report back
To their officers
That yes, the danger
Still exists
And by god and goddess
What a woman to win
And to keep
If you can avoid the spell.

But of course
The fun lies still
In bringing down
The danger of your spell
And in the allure
Of singing their aches
To you
Without words
In a far, unknown place.

And for a few,
If they were once easy with words,
In trying to find the right sounds
To capture the essence
Of your eyes
All at once,
Without fading.







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