A beloved poem

In 2006, I submitted some poems to a publication called "Runes, A Review of Poetry."  It was one of my earliest tries at publication, and they didn't choose my work.  However, I received an even greater gift! When I received my copy of "Runes," there was a poem in it that almost stopped my heart.  The author is Lianne Spidel. If I ever need inspiration, and nothing else will work, I turn to this poem.  I do not exaggerate when I say that this poem is up in my top 20 poems of all time. Enjoy!


Daughters of Eve

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.

Lianne Spidel