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Song Playing is "I Will Always Love You"
Mother And Daughter And Words Of Love
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The scene is this: mother, daughter, a child's book, and a world.
This doctor's office of onlookers appears to know the words of the book
and the milky words of a childhood world and love them.
They have cupped this tiny face, the onlooking strangers,
rolling their unfamiliar eyes over the innocent picture, the moving picture.
Her mother reads from the little book,
holding the book in front of her young daughter's eyes,
as there was knowledge in the book,
and knowledge in her mother's hands,
which pressed a warm print into the colored cover,
and the book was gorgeous, the book was life,
the book was the little girl baptized amid the throes of pages.
For the little girl and the little book joined at one
in the mother's eyes, sprung from the isolation
of mother and daughter and a antiseptic office of strangers.
But eyes of the young one stared everywhere
except at the indifferent book; stared at the faces of the others
waiting like wan plants under a wan sky.
No book held magic for young eyes
titillated by the faces of people whose blank, older faces
she would some day become,
forty springs, forty Aprils from this day
marked by fairy tale words,
and a mother's literate hands,
wringing out of a small book, language and love.
ll
So mother reads but daughter does not always look,
as someday daughter will read
and mother will not look,
in days of strange homes and strange embraces,
in days when tears strive to be less than tears,
in the days when families will be dwindling; to nothing, to memory.
There is language and there is love,
and there are lives,
imitating the two. They are the two. They are their lives.
And life does its sad, inevitable reversals;
daughter becomes the mother, mother becomes the daughter;
they are reversed, yet still a unit of love.
But in the beautiful present, things are as they should be:
this is a mother/daughter union of gargantuan words;
tender words read from a child's book, spoken softly
from literary mouths of a maternal mining of gold,
and a voyeuristic world
watching these two lost in recitation's entirety.
Written by Lamont Palmer
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