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The Timely Life of an Ordinary Woman
Where are her epics, odes, and elegies? What is she, chopped liver?
Poets love untimely deaths of beautiful women -
Love imagining a choir of angels, singing
“Hallelujah!” at Death’s eventual reunion of young
(And foolish) lovers, one of whom
(No doubt) has pined his life away,
Steadfast in unrequited love for her —
That figment of memory, ideal.
No one writes poetry for the ordinary mama,
Tummy-rolls slick with kitchen grease and sweat,
Drenched in mopped up tears and child-snot,
Stray hairs — hers, the cats’, the kids’ —
Woven into the tapestry of graying strands.
Where are the poems for her embrace,
Warm, ample arms and soft fragrant curves?
She, who has birthed and nurtured poets
At her breast, is she not worthy of an epic?
Where is the elegy for a woman of no importance,
A woman of ordinary nut-brown plumage
Shielding, protecting those she would have shine
Instead? She is a stable staple of hearth and home:
Unobtrusive, unlovely, but nourishing as chicken liver.
