Tuesday Poem: "Poem for Ilana"

Like the tree for which you were named,

you combine the aesthetic with the practical.

Your principles stand firm

in the buffeting winds of peer pressure,

you offer the weak and voiceless

the shelter of your humanity

as branches beckon the birds,

you bear the fruit of your personality,

growing with each year

and proudly tended and harvested

by your loved ones,

you send out new shoots and tendrils

to embrace the shape of experience

and inhale the oxygen of knowledge,

you grow upward, ever upward

in anticipation of the limitless sky

and when you smile,

we behold it with the same joy

as awakening to the first blossoms of Spring.

I wrote this poem many years ago when I was working for a South African Jewish family on a moshav in northern Israel. Ilana was their teenage daughter and she was only a couple of years away from having to do her compulsory two year military service that most young Israelis must do when they turn eighteen. Ilana is Hebrew for tree, an appropriate name for someone growing up in a horticultural environment.

Please excuse the late posting, but school holidays can be all-consuming for a parent.

Tuesday Poem: "On Children and Mothers"

Your fervent hopes that I write

“something about children”

is a mother’s nature revealed.

By their selfless love

they second their lives to those of their children.

To write of children is to write of mothers.

Five years of life stares down

through coal buttons of mischief and wonders,

Are these groggy, surly people

really in control of the world out there?

The world of five is bound by a desire

for no boundaries,

to be with the big people,

but there are compensations for masks

and early bedtimes: shielded

from the jags and gouges of a world

outside Transformers, morning TV, Bubble-O-Bills,

kindergarten Picassos and a mother’s love.

Six months of life

represents the investment of a lot of breast milk

as he gurgles in his bouncer

throwing a curve ball smile

through his rusk-besmirched mouth.

His perimeters are smaller than his brother’s,

wind and tears and the succour of the breast

while the faces of giants fill his vision

and huge hands lift him skyward.

And always there is mother,

balancing her day with theirs,

shepherding, nurturing, cajoling them

towards that, over which she has no control:

the future.

In 1986, I was staying for a couple of weeks with my cousin and his wife in Sydney en route to Perth. Their two sons described in this poem are now fine, young adults, forging their way in the world.

The poet wishes to acknowledge One Luv Art Promotion, the publishers of the book, Mother and Child Vibration Heart exhibition, in which this poem first appeared.