Happy Mother's Day!

   I enjoy poetry very much. One of my favorite all around poetry books is Best Loved Poems of the American People, published in 1936. As a very young mother I discovered this poem in that book. It pierced my heart and in those very early days of motherhood myself, it changed how I viewed being a mother, and honestly life in general. Happy Mother's Day!

Motherhood

by Agnes Lee

Mary, the Christ long slain, passed silently.

Following the children joyously astir

Under the cedrus and the olive tree,

Pausing to let their laughter float to her.

Each voice an echo of a voice more dear,

        

She saw a little Christ in every face;

When lo, another woman, gliding near,

Yearned o’er the tender life that filled the place.

And Mary sought the woman’s hand, and spoke:

“I know thee not, yet know thy memory tossed

With all a thousand dreams their eyes evoke

Who bring to thee a child beloved and lost.

  “I, too, have rocked my little one,

  O, He was fair!

  Yea, fairer than the fairest sun,

    

  And like its rays through amber spun

  His sun-bright hair.

  Still I can see it shine and shine.”

  “Even so,” the woman said, “was mine.”

  “His ways were ever darling ways,”—

   

  And Mary smiled,—

  “So soft, so clinging! Glad relays

  Of love were all His precious days.

  My little child!

  My infinite star! My music fled!”

    

  “Even so was mine,” the woman said.

  Then whispered Mary: “Tell me, thou,

  Of thine.” And she:

  “O, mine was rosy as a bough

  Blooming with roses, sent, somehow,

       

  To bloom for me!

  His balmy fingers left a thrill

  Within my breast that warms me still.”

  Then gazed she down some wilder, darker hour,

  And said, when Mary questioned, knowing not,

       

  “Who art thou, mother of so sweet a flower?”

  “I am the mother of Iscariot.”

Photo "My Garden Roses" provided by Georgianna Lane.