Art by Lucy PierceAll my art, is stolen
from the clutches of my motherhood.
Poems scribbled on napkins,
and drawings traced on the backs
of my babies as they stumble
towards sleep.
Whatever births,
had better be quick,
hot and fast.
No presence residing to revise
and to intricately labour.
Just the raw pouring forth,
before I’m enveloped again
by the detritus of my service.
All my poems are stolen
from the mouths of my babes.
So excruciating at times
to feel Her rise,
the Queen of my creativity,
suddenly there in the kitchen
amidst the breakfast dishes,
emerging inexplicably from the dregs
of my servitude,
an unexpected grace
that I barely have room for.
I scramble for a pen
and a spare piece of paper
to offer her.
There’s some space on the back
of a shopping list,
and a child’s dirty crayon.
I clear a space on the cluttered table,
and wipe away the toast crumbs
from the chair,
I ask her to sit down
but tell her she’ll have to be quick
because we have to hang out the washing
before dressing the kids.
All my art is squeezed
through the eye of a needle.
The gravity of the couch
with the tangled limbs
of my no longer babies,
the fierce, sticky love,
is never quite what you bargained for
and sometimes it feels as though
you gave up too much
for the privilege of peace-keeping
between siblings
and the trimming of dirty fingernails.
But other times,
that same grace descends,
from the blue,
as you watch your boy,
your shining sun,
hurtle down the hill towards you,
golden and grubby
and you understand that motherhood
is its own art,
and the humans grown
each a rugged masterpiece,
and all the poems lost,
for lack of time,
and all the paintings unrealized
for arms too full to hold another thing,
but the wood
and the dishes
and the washing,
have somehow woven their way
into the fibers of the future,
in these wild and wayward beings,
who love and fight so fiercely
and with such chaotic abandon.
I hear threads of thematic resonance
between all the songs I never wrote
and my 6 year old daughters
glorious abandon
to improvised soliloquies.
There is the stolen thrill
of being let in so close
to the pristine magnificence
of a daughter grown,
the exquisite softness of her
in the cusps of my hands.
All my art,
flows through the great canyon lands
of my heart,
carved with the tears and the blood
and the sweat of my motherhood,
the great ask of this love
to make of myself something
and nothing, all at once.
I am learning to see,
what my world may deny,
that all life is an act of art-making,
of love-making,
and not the least of which,
is the crafting of a heart
that can map the terrain of a love
so mind boggling vast and mundane.
All the tiny acts,
the minute strokes that build the world,
that paint a picture,
that write a poem,
that tend to the wayward tangles
in the wild mane
of our Earth’s future custodians,
each an act of labour,
each an act of love.
And I wonder how it might be different
if I were to reframe
my perception.
That rather than being
the artist I am
despite my children,
I am the artist I am
because of them.
Because all my art,
including my motherhood,
is stolen from the heart,
as a prayer
of love
to the future
unknown.