Last poem of Poetry Month

My news is that our poetry reading at the library seemed to be a success last night. We enjoyed, once again, being able to share some work of other poets, and some of our own with others. At the end of Poetry Month, I feel oddly reflective about how much poetry has changed my life, and the lives of many others I know. About how much I continue to need it, probably more than the genre needs me. I learned young to turn to writing, and I will forever be grateful. A Scandinavian myth says that "Poetry is a mix of blood and honey." I agree.

So, now that I have stepped down from my soap box:) Here is one of the poems I read last night. It really hits home for me.

Daughters of Eve
by Lianne Spidel

I have found DNA in skeletons thousands of years old and seen exactly the same genes in my own friends... We are all connected through our mothers to only a handful of women living tens of thousands of years ago.
-Bryan Sykes, "The Seven Daughters of Eve"

Mother, even if you questioned the mystery
of dividing cells, I doubt you thought
of them as I do - a line of ragtag recruits
committed to making a new person.

You passed to me one constant strain,
tidy as the spices lined on your kitchen shelf -
cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, - those
your mother favored, and hers before.

The clan mothers were hunters who bore
their daughters in caves. Perhaps the one
the scientists call Tara claims us,
who never saw the green-hilled land

your mother's mother never saw, who played
a flute made from the wing bone of a swan,
who strung a dozen strands of shells
and wore them to her sand dune grave.

Of all who came before, no one can tell
whose laugh you made your own, whose
stubbornness, but one of seven laid down
in you good timber for a necessary fire.

You wondered how you got me anyway, always
my father's child. Know that you gave me
the flame of myself and that it ends
with me, a mother of sons.