Into her mother’s bedroom to wash the ballooning body. <br />“My mother is jelly-hearted and she has a brain of jelly: <br />Sweet, quiver-soft, irrelevant. Not essential. <br />Only a habit would cry if she should die. <br />A pleasant sort of fool without the least iron. . . . <br />Are you better, mother, do you think it will come today?” <br />The stretched yellow rag that was Jessie Mitchell’s mother <br />Reviewed her. Young, and so thin, and so straight. <br />So straight! as if nothing could ever bend her. <br />But poor men would bend her, and doing things with poor men, <br />Being much in bed, and babies would bend her over, <br />And the rest of things in life that were for poor women, <br />Coming to them grinning and pretty with intent to bend and to kill. <br />Comparisons shattered her heart, ate at her bulwarks: <br />The shabby and the bright: she, almost hating her daughter, <br />Crept into an old sly refuge: “Jessie’s black <br />And her way will be black, and jerkier even than mine. <br />Mine, in fact, because I was lovely, had flowers <br />Tucked in the jerks, flowers were here and there. . . .” <br />She revived for the moment settled and dried-up triumphs, <br />Forced perfume into old petals, pulled up the droop, <br />Refueled <br />Triumphant long-exhaled breaths. <br />Her exquisite yellow youth . . .<br /><br />Gwendolyn Brooks<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/jessie-mitchell-s-mother/
