My Mother's Hands

A re-found poem from an earlier season

I wrote this poem about my mom and my daughter back when winter was turning to spring, as I was thinking about generations and what is passed down to—and between—us. Even though it’s now coming on fall, the turn of a season made me think of it.

Enjoy!

My Mother’s Hands

A northern cardinal is the first

to announce spring,

a balm for the silence

that winter fastened to the trees.

Next, my two-year-old daughter

finds a maple seed

still wrapped in its brown coat, worn and thin,

and a green shoot is growing.

She asks to plant it.

“This seed’s perfect,” she says,

admiring her work.

Looking at her, I have to agree.

Now, maple seeds are growing

everywhere in the garden beds.

I pluck these tree-children out

from the parts of the yard I curate

into a garden

though I’m not entirely sure

I have the right to do so.

But then...this is the wonder

of spring, isn’t it?

For a few sweet months,

there will be an abundance,

a too-muchness,

a time when pulling a maple seed

does not feel like a diminishment

but an opening.

Abundance is in my daughter,

too, as her mind expands

to meet the world that

is also sprouting within her,

words and dreams and songs,

and so many moments that will

fall away like so many maple seeds:

failing to take root in her young memory.

But those moments live,

vibrant and perfect,

even in their brevity.

I see them light up her eyes.

I mean to say that spring is here

and all of us are made

of all that did and did not take root in us.

We are abundance.

We are openings.

After weeding the garden,

my hands, covered in dark soil,

become my mother’s hands.

The hands of a woman who labored in gardens.

Isn’t that strange? That I did not know

I had my mother’s hands until this earth

curved inside my fingernails

and this soil found the cracks in my skin?

And isn’t it a blessing

what we inherit and what we pass on

and how, even in this fleeting existence,

we are not deterred from reaching for sunlight?