The spider silk of my love failed me today.
Dangled taut over breakfast table chaos
Daring acrobatics and impossible feats then
Snap
I lie broken-legged upside down
Amidst spoons and milk and a fraying school run.
I snipped and snarled and lashed out
with vicious jaws and wicked words; You
were a victim of my venom, No match
for my untamed temper and charmless aggression
I wanted to taste blood today.
You covered your fear with spikes and screams
made my fury rise, I want you to
fester and decay in my web of hurts.
Post school, my shoulders are a throb of tension
as I try again to reclaim my love for you
but out of my lips comes only hate and mean.
Asleep, your eyelashes beg forgiveness
and my howl of regret wakens the moon.
I’m a hateful Bad Mother, new species of worst
uncurling much later, my poison drips across
the page, accusing, alleging, confessing the truth.
Tomorrow I will make my web out of guilt.
Some days it’s stronger than my love.
Some days it’s all that I have.
2 Responses to “A web of words”
Helen Sargeant
This is such a beautiful poem, and as I read it I saw myself and my experiences as a mother in your words. Its so upsetting when our children make us feel angry. Anger is so repressed, it leaches out, it has to escape. Anger and guilt and frustration. I often feel all three of these. I look at my children sleeping at night looking vulnerable, content, you go over the day, what you have done and said. I often question did I do this right, that right. There is so much to fret about, and then I cannot sleep. So the next day I am not as patient as I might be and the whole cycle begins again.
Spiders are so busy at this time of year, building their webs, laying their cluster of eggs, and then they die.
Motherhood is so transient, as quick as our children are growing we are fading. There is so much life and so much loss in the maternal. It is indeed a web, and now I am thinking of Louise Bourgeois and all her beautiful spiders and webs.
Mo
Oh my gosh Kaye
Thank you
Thank you
Thank you