Tuesday, February 07, 2006

A Mother's Legacy: Flower Girl Poetry

Not Possible
You can't put the love
and laughter and tears
of a lifetime in a book
that costs 34 cents. But you
can try...

ECT





My mother died in 1979. I never really knew her as an adult, becuase I left home when I was seventeen. But she was an amazing poet. She was always scribbling bits and pieces of her poetic thoughts in pencil in a spiral notebook. After she died I thought the notebooks were lost because I never could find them at my Dad's house. I remember asking my Dad about them and he said he got rid of all my Mom's stuff. I thought they were lost forever.

I was so blessed to find three of them when I was packing up my Dad'd stuff in New Orleans to move him to stay with my family before he died. This was around 2000. I was so happy to see the notebooks again. It was a found treasure. . However, it was a bittersweet happiness. I couldn't pick them up without crying. There's so much of her in her poetry and I miss her so much. I had so much guilt for so many years for not being there when she died. God has been working His healing work in my heart in this area. I have a beautiful picture of her when she was twelve years old next to my bed. I can now look at the picture with pleasure instead of pain. God is so good.

They've been packed away for years. I've wanted to transcribe them and make them available for others to read. Well, I think I've found a great medium to initially publish my mother's poems. I created a blog, called Flower Girl Poetry. I'm still working out the technical difficulties with it so it's not quite ready to announce. The blog I created with my allmyways ID can only have information "about me" on it. Of course, I want to put info "about her". So I created another id and a blog called http://flowergirlpoems.blogspot.com. Like I said, it's not really ready the way I want it to be but I posted the first poem called Legacy on it.

As soon as I get a flat-bed scanner I will post some pictures of her to the blog. I also want to scan the handwritten text of the poems with the transcribed text. I tried taking digital pictures but they're not clear enough. So stay tuned for some great Flower Girl Poetry.

1 comment:

Donna said...

I'm so sorry you lost your parents so young -- and happy that you are now able to find a way to honor your mother and her poetry.