~ Mama ~

When you bake.....pound cakes just because, 

cakes with shaved chocolate on top of homemade chocolate icing for birthdays, 

melt in your mouth red velvet cakes at Christmas time...

You make more of heaven on earth and you do it with just two hands.

I saw how you learned to pray.

In my teen years, I stayed out too late and you stayed in knots too long.

I put you down and somehow you put up with me,

I was wild and you showed me how grace can be wilder still.

How many times did I get in trouble and you got a call from someone, 

you had to listen and hear the embarrassing thing that involved your daughter.

You learned that the way to move heaven and earth isn't with a strong arm, but with a bowed head.

You and Dad kept the vow to love when all the sparkle had faded,

but your love today is stronger than I've ever seen it, 

and you'll never know what that means to me and how glorious you are.

I can close my eyes, anytime anywhere, and see your hands and the blueness of your eyes, 

I can smell your cooking and remember its taste, 

how it satisfied my soul just as much as my stomach.

I can see your yard, all the trees you planted, 

the fullness of the flower beds, the growth along the front porch and the beauty its become.

You make more of heaven on earth and you do it with just two hands.

I love your embrace and how you smell like Perry Ellis perfume,

and how you sometimes kiss my cheek, so soft, like it might break me, and it does.

Mothers never stop being with child, you always make a space for me within you.

Thank you for the thousand ways you've shaped me,
my today has a lot to do with all of your faithful yesterdays.

- Jenn Bowden

*some parts of this poem are adapted from and inspired by Ann Voskamp