Dear Mama or, I Steal Titles From Tupac.

Today is really not that big of a deal to me. After all, I'm not a mom. But I do have a mom. And luckily, I have the kind of mom who doesn't like Mother's Day. The kind of mom who would rather have you slap her across the face than hand her a Hallmark card prefabricated with generic sentiments and sold in bulk around the nation for lazy people to express their "emotions" for only $3.

Mom did, however issue a challenge: for each of her kids to write her a poem. A way of leveling the playing field, which really was another way of saying, "Hey, Nora. I know you aren't in an Ivy league school, enlisted in the military, or a new mother, but you also have a chance or being my favorite child for at least a minute." Did I step up to the challenge? Not exactly.

I'm not much of a poet. I stumbled upon some poetry I had written in high school, so narcisisstic and overly emotional that it embarrassed me to be sitting alone in my old bedroom reading what had clearly been something I thought worthy of writing in perfect cursive on college-rule loose leaf and keeping in a 5-Star 3-ring binder and hiding in the back of my closet.

More recent efforts have fallen short. I'm much more capable of expressing myself through sarcasm or stories about diarrhea than I am at spinning my feelings into neat and moving verses, veiling emotions in well-crafted metaphors or clever turns of phrase.

Besides, how can any poem about my mom possibly compete with Tupac's 'Dear Mama' or Nelly's 'Luven Me'? Or, more importantly, Boyz II Men's 'Mama'?

The point is that I don't need a special day to tell the world that my mom is the shit. But if it will make her happy, I'll try to write a poem.

You have
beautiful hands
Strong
With long fingers
My fingers.
And your eyes are my eyes
And your mother's eyes as well
Pools of blue reflecting through generations
I have
a different nose
But you don't hold it against me.
We have
soft, round lips
And loud laughs
And long legs
(Big feet)
And a thread
that connects us each
an invisible web
That stretches across these
mountains
and rivers
and plains
The one cord that can't be cut.

Sorry it isn't a sonnet. I love you.