For My Mother in Her Mid-90s
Aunt.
Don’t ask
me how
I come to address my mother thus.
Long
complex, complicated stories:
heart-warmingly familial and
sadly colonial.
You know how
utterly, wonderfully
insensitive the young can be?
Oh no. We are not here talking adults
who should know better
but never do.
Aunt,
I thank you for
being alive today, alert, crisp.
Since we don’t know tomorrow,
see me touching wood,
clutching at timbers, hugging forests:
So I can enter young,
age, infirmities
defied.
Hear my offspring chirping:
“Mummy, touch plastic,
it lasts longer!”
O, she knows her mama well.
The queen of plastics a tropical Bedouin,
she must travel light.
Check out the wood,
feel its weight, its warmth
check out the beauty of its lines, and perfumed shavings.
Back to you, My Dear Mother,
I can hear the hailing chorus
at the drop of your name.
And don’t I love to drop it
here, there, and everywhere?
Not missing out by time of day,
not only when some chance provides,
but pulled and dragged into talks
private and public.
Listen to the “is-your-mother-still-alive” greeting,
eyes popping out,
mouth agape and trembling:
That here,
in narrow spaces and
not-much-time,
who was I to live?
Then she who bore me?
Me da ase.
Ye de ase.
Copyright Credit: Ama Ata Aidoo, "For My Mother in Her Mid-90s" from After the Ceremonies: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska Press. Reprinted by permission of University of Nebraska Press.
Source: After the Ceremonies: New and Selected Poems (University of Nebraska Press, 2017)