Ode to My Mom
(for Annette Semino Galán)
by Ralph Semino Galan
Copyright 2016 by Ralph Semino Galan
Copyright 2016 by Ralph Semino Galan
Mother, who is pushing seventy,
smiles at me, cracks a joke, laughs.
She has weathered all sorts
of tragedies: my grandmother's
early widowhood and her childhood
deprivation; her college years
in an industrial city after the quiet
of her hometown's somnolence;
her early and latter career battles
with principals and superintendents;
the sudden death of her husband,
my father, after the Great Flood.
I am awed by her cheerfulness
and her resilience, though sometimes
a chink in her armor shows, a tear
running down her plump cheek
as she remembers a certain event,
with or without regrets: the death
of a family member, both near
or far; the births of her six children;
debuts and weddings; her desire
to have a host of grandchildren...
Mother smiles, cracks a joke, laughs,
while I can only gift her with this poem.
BIO- Ralph Semino Galán is Assistant Director at UST Center for Creative Writing and Literary Studies and Associate Professor at UST Faculty of Arts and Letters
Reprinted with permission of the author. Thanks, Ralph!
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- Tags: poem, poetry, mother, son, Filipino, Filipina, UST, creative writing, Ralph Galan
This is all for now,
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