I Think We Validate Our Lives Through

With My Poems, I Finally Won Even My Mother. The Longest Wooing Of My Life.

Now That I Am In My Forties, She [my Mother] Tells Me I'm Beautiful; Now That I Am In My Forties, She Sends Me Presents And We Have The Long, Personal And Even Remarkably Honest Phone Calls I Always Wanted So Intensely I Forbade Myself To Imagine Them. How Strange. Perhaps Shaw Was Correct And If We Lived To Be Several Hundred Years Old, We Would Finally Work It All Out. I Am Deeply Grateful. With My Poems, I Finally Won Even My Mother. The Longest Wooing Of My Life.

Love Says, Mine. Love Says, I Could Eat You Up. Love Says, Stay As You Are, Be My Own Private Thing, Don't You Dare Have Ideas I Don't Share. Love Has Just Got To Gobble The Other, Bones And All, Crunch. I Don't Want To Do That. I Sure Don't Want It Done To Me!

You Are Built To Pull A Cart, To Lift A Heavy Load And Bear It, To Haul Up The Long Slope, And So Am I, Peasant Bodies, Earthy, Solid Shapely Dark Glazed Clay Pots That Can Stand On The Fire.

Every Artist Creates With Open Eyes What She Sees In Her Dream.