Discovering Mom’s childhood ambition was at first a small shock, then an aha moment. No wonder she had been impelled to compose dozens of funny verses for friends, relatives, and even relative strangers over the years, in honor of birthdays, anniversaries, and Elderhostel farewell dinners. No wonder she often referred to me as a “published author,” in a tone that conveyed both pride and wistfulness. Still, I wasn’t surprised that Mom had never revealed this ambition to me, just as she hadn’t told me she’d been valedictorian of her high school class until she and I were on opposite sides of middle age.

Like many women of her WWII generation, Mom had crafted a woe-is-not-me version of her life story. She never said she regretted dropping out of college to get married, or becoming a housewife and mother.

Whether because of her affinity for rhyming poetry or mother-daughter osmosis, I would occasionally suggest to Mom that she sign up for a writing class. The answer was always no. “Your father is a much better writer than I am,” she would say.

“You can take a class by yourself,” I would counter, although I knew that Mom was mostly allergic to solo activities. My parents, next-door neighbors who had married right after my father came back from his WWII service, were more like a unit than a couple.

So when she became a widow, after 71 years of marriage and at the beginning of a global pandemic, I worried about how she would be able to manage at her assisted living residence, much less fully grieve. But it turned out that Mom, a relentless extrovert, had an urgent need to connect during an impossible time. She not only mastered Zoom links, but also told me tshe was writing down stories about her life, albeit on slips of note paper and the backs of envelopes.

And then, almost a year to the day after my father’s death, she agreed to let me sign her up for a virtual poetry workshop sponsored by the American Jewish Historical Society in New York City.  Occurring in conjunction with AJHS’s national poetry contest, the evening sessions revolved around the theme and techniques that poet Emma Lazarus had used in composing “The New Colossus.”

At first, Mom and I didn’t discuss her admiration for Emma Lazarus or whether she had interest in the contest, which asked both youth and adults to respond to the question: “If you could write a poem for the Statue of Liberty today, what would you say?”

But we did do a morning debrief after each class. Mom told me that she liked how the teacher, an accomplished poet, gave them timed writing exercises and feedback. She also liked seeing and hearing from an assortment of people. “There was even a man from California!” she exclaimed.

  Sometimes taking an afternoon nap so she could stay up for the evening sessions, she always came away energized. Writing rhyming verse seemed to come to her as naturally as recalling all the words to Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” or Longfellow’s “Hiawatha.” And when she took on the task of composing her own poem for the Statue of Liberty, she seemed as driven as a latter-day Emma Lazarus, who, like Mom, had started writing poetry as a teenager.

  “I wrote it in the middle of the night!” Mom said, during our next call. “It’s called ‘When the Statue Cried.’   ‘ Can I read it to you?”

  As Mom started her recitation,

I wanted to both cry and applaud. In lamenting how America no longer represented the golden door that had given her immigrant father the opportunity to escape persecution in Ukraine, Mom also seemed to be excavating some of her own subterranean sadness.

  After the last session of the workshop, she agreed to let me submit “When the Statue Cried” to the AJHS contest, in the Adult Emerging Poet category, although we laughed about that designation. But it was true that Mom was emerging in a new way, putting aside some of her grief and rekindling the love of poetry that had been with her since childhood.

Months later, we learned that she didn’t win; but she was somewhat mollified to find out that her poem was going to be archived at the AJHS next to the papers of Emma Lazarus. Yet like any emerging adult poet or writer, she wanted her work to be “out there.” So she took it upon herself to send her poem to relatives and friends, several of whom said her poem made them “teary.” What she didn’t expect was that one of them would submit her poem to a local publication in her Wilmington, Delaware community—and that it would have a ripple effect. The editor not only published “When the Statue Cried,” complete with Mom’s bio, but also asked her to send in other poems.

After that Mom, at ninety-six, garnered more than two dozen publishing credits, on topics ranging from parenting to holidays to separation and loss. And she continued to ask me for advice and comments, as a “fellow writer”—which has both sweetened and softened our sometimes complicated, introvert daughter/extrovert mother dynamic.

  “I love you, Marla Brown,” Mom said during one recent phone call, using my maiden name. Years ago, I would have chafed at this, fretting about boundaries. But this time I smiled. “Love you too, Mom,” I said.

 

 

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by Kim Duke

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