Poetry Thursday

I wandered over to the website this morning and discovered that this week's theme was Time ...

I like the way the weekly themes are wide open to individual interpretation and so it was that while I was looking through my favourite poems I found a poem by the Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti, about his mother; a woman always waiting for her sons to be allowed to return to her home, their homeland.

Meanwhile I'm waiting to see if my daughter and her daughter will join me here, so this poem seems right on so many levels, even though I rarely make coffee alone.

Mourid's poem:

She wants to go to a planet away from the earth
Where the paths are crowded with people running to their rooms
And where the beds in the morning are chaos
And the pillows wake up crumpled,
Their cotton stuffing dipping in the middle.
She wants the washing lines full and much, much rice to cook for lunch
And a large, large kettle boiling on the fire in the afternoon
And the table for everyone in the evening, its tablecloth dripping with the sesame of chatter.
She wants the smell of garlic at noon to gather the absent ones
And is surprised that the mother's stew is weaker than the power of governments and that her pastry in the evening
Dries on a sheet untouched by any hand.
Can the earth contain
The cruelty of a mother making her coffee alone
On a Diaspora morning?
She wants to go to a planet away from the earth
Where all directions lead to the harbour of the bosom,
The gulf of two arms
That receive and know no farewells.
She wants airplanes to come back only.
Airports to be for those returning,
The planes to land and never leave again.

Mourid Barghouti
from, I Saw Ramallah

But there was another reason for me tying this poem in with the Time theme ... images in his poem took me back to when I was living in Turkey; the land where I experienced some of the most stunning hospitality ever. The mother, the family and home are important there and this poem captures so much of that.