A "Motherless" Day

We are “motherless” now, my wife and me 

There is no way to express such loss to thee

Unless you, too, are  “motherless” like we.

No poem, no thought, no song, can begin to tell

This “motherless” life we now know so well

The emptiness it creates--nothing can dispel.

Elizabeth Chase Akers Allen’s poem tries….

“Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,

Make me a child again just for tonight!

Mother come back from the echoless shore,

Take me again to your heart as of yore…”

Whittier seems to see something of what it means…

“A picture memory brings to me;

I look across the years and see

Myself beside my mother’s knee.

I feel her gentle hand restrain

My selfish moods, and know again

A child’s blind sense of wrong and pain.

But wiser now, a man gray grown,

My childhood’s needs are better known.

My mother’s chastening love I own.”

Even Kipling, in “Mother o’ Mine” is in touch with the “motherless”…

“If I were hanged on the highest hill,

Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!

I know whose love would follow me still,

Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!

What do the “motherless” do on this day?

We remember and honor our mothers, and say,

Celebrate, honor, and love your mothers, too,  while it is day.