My Mother's Photograph

© 2001 by Edessa Ramos

Performed at the WORDBEATS Poetry Event
Ethnographic Museum, City of Zurich, November 2002

This morning
I took out an old banig* box
from my mother's trunk,
opened it
and found 
her picture.

Her hair was rich and dark
twisted into a bun,
coiled gracefully atop her head

so different from the way I remember her
for there were no wrinkles 
around her eyes,
only the fingertraces 
of laughter disguised
like fine cobwebs clinging 
to the ceiling of her soul.

She wore an ancient dress
showing off her slender waist,
her shoulders the color of corn husks,
her wrists, slim,
her fingers speaking of the books
whose pages she had turned,
of the fabrics whose seams she had sewn,
of the music whose keys she had stroked
long ago, 
when she had dared to dream
and dared to fly
before she had been made to cling to the earth,
where longings are nurtured
subversively
in the secret cradle of her silences.

Then, to my surprise,
to my dismay at being caught
seated on her bedroom floor invading
the most private enclaves of her life,

my mother stepped out from the photograph
to gaze at me.

I have never looked deep into my mother's eyes.
As a child I had been taught
to hold my voice and keep my feelings low.
I grew up forgetting how to celebrate my dreams
through the smile in my mother's eyes.
I had forgotten how to preserve the mysteries of myself
for I had forgotten how to look at her.

I had been taught
as she had been taught.

For the first time I saw 
everything that had been kept from me.

I saw the anguish of her years,
of giving to the point of emptying,
I saw the wounds I carved upon her heart
all the time I was growing up.

I reached out to touch the throbbing core
of all the pain that I had given her...
my hand drew back in horror
I tried to edge away 

but slowly she moved, slowly
closer to me, closer

as close to me as the day I was born
when nothing divided us,
when my smell was her smell,
when my tears were her tears,
and then...

I saw her take wing -
all her longings, her subversive desires,
the woman that she was but could not be -
suddenly freed.

Then her eyes lit into a radiant smile.
She blew me a kiss 
as she stepped back
into the photograph.

I closed the box.

*banig - a native Filipino material made from woven grass