Today I bring you flowers
What might seem for Mother's Day
But more so, I bring you flowers
To send my love your way
I've always brought you flowers
From my garden or Mother Earth
It seems that flowers best describe
The woman who gave me birth
A flower's beauty is unique
Each blossom from another
Together they make the garden
Made up of every mother
Born from the earth
Emerge to the sun
This is the treasured journey
Of a mother, most treasured one
A mother longs to have
Each child walk behind
But she loves harder the one
Whose own path must find
So today, I want to thank you
For the hard love you chose to give
For it stretches across a great divide
And now in my heart can live
I may never be more like you
Than a simple home grown bloom
But in this flower, I see you
And in your heart where you've made room
You remember the autumn
When I buried all you gave
But in spring something emerges
From that dark and painful grave
The love we share never died
It is the breath that brings the new
Mother, today I bring you flowers
To say "I'm okay because of you"
© Ruby Neumann
Poet's Note:
Written May 10, 2023
May 10, 1987 was Mother's Day, and it was the day of my graduation from high school. That day, after I came off the stage, I brought a single rose to my mother. I have been bringing my mother flowers since I was a small child. I saw beauty in nature and I saw beauty in her… the two always went together.
Maybe only my mother knows how much pain my path in life has caused her. Her love stood against every storm I sent her way. Today, I am not the dream she once had, but I am the daughter she will always have and will always love. For that I am grateful, and as the last line in the poem goes… I am okay because of her.
