FREE VERSE Poem: Whispering In Tongues From A Place In Her Heart, by Martina Reisz Newberry

from the poem Half Japanese Buddhist Daughter: A Poem of Love to Mother
by Francesca Biller

Every mother’s story is a story of need:
theirs, hers, the household’s, the great world’s.
Her imagination has been her worst fail:
chimerical visions of danger, misdeed,

fright, illness, grief. Her body has not sufficed,
her love has not been enough (important people
told her this). Her understanding and patience
failed. Her parenting style was a poltergeist

at best, malarial at its worst. Every
memory aches with her wrongdoing. God or
the universe or her own mother let her
know beyond all knowing (this in reverie)

what she ought to have been and what she was not.
She read the books the experts wrote, listened to
what the speakers spoke, purchased and heard the tapes,
kept the appointments, permitted everything..

The struggle to believe, the deconstruction on
the road to wisdom was the road she followed;
the signs were painted by all the mothers she
ever knew. They pointed just one direction:

See the sign. The pop-art finger shows one path:
This Way In. This Way Out. Beware of Quicksand.
All Damages Paid At the End of this road.
All Sins Confirmed By Your Offsprings’ Frozen Wrath.