This second Sunday in May, Mother's Day is celebrated in Venezuela. Although everyone agrees that Mother's Day is every day, internationally a date has been taken to celebrate it and thank you for all the good things that mothers have done for us.

According to historians, it is believed that the first celebrations on behalf of mothers were held under the direction and programming of Anna Jarvis, and these activities consisted of mothers meeting to talk and exchange opinions. On May 12, 1907, two years after her mother's death, Ana Jarvis wanted to commemorate the death and organized a Mother's Day to do so. From then on, each country began to take a particular day to celebrate mothers. For example: Norway celebrates it on the second Sunday in February; Romania on March 8; Syria on March 21; Spain on the first Sunday in May; Poland on May 26; and Venezuela on the second Sunday in May, also Bangladesh, Canada, Croatia, the United States, Brazil, the Czech Republic, among other countries. Venezuela's initiative to celebrate a day dedicated to mothers was made for the first time on May 24, 1921 in Valencia, Carabobo State, by Dr. Jesús María Arcay Smith.

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Since the beginning of time, the figure of the mother has been a motive for attention, study and celebration in all arts and sciences. For example, the exaltation of the mother figure is a tangential theme in universal literature. Such attention to the mother is neither fortuitous nor invariable. The mother is not always the adored woman, good, magnanimous and full of virtues; in literature we can also find the cruel and irrational mother as Medea; the repressive and castrating mother as Federico García Lorca's Bernarda, in La casa de Bernarda Alba (Bernarda Alba's house); or the mother who is remembered with her defects and who is claimed after death, in La luna it is not oven bread; or the young Lorena misguided mother of Ensayo con error (Trial with error) by the writer Héctor Torres. The mothers, neither holy nor perverse; human and real, are those we find in the pages of some narrative or poetic books and about which I would like to talk to you today.

In Venezuelan poetry, one of the writers who wrote the most to mothers was Andrés Eloy Blanco. The loving and eternal relationship with his progenitor is present in his work. On one occasion he said: "If I could choose for myself my place as a poet, without anyone being able to deny me, I would be the poet of mothers. There is no more illustrious subject, no higher motive, no more pure reason to be a poet. In this opportunity I will give you the penultimate stanza of his poem El regreso a la madre (The return to the mother):

Mother: in this happy colloquy of my return
two heavens bless:
the Fatherland, where our heart is imprisoned;
the Mother, which is the country we first inhabit.

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In this poem we see how the lyrical voice speaks of the unpleasant experiences that he had to live far from the homeland and far from the mother. In the verses we find a man disappointed in the love of other women, but sure of the love of the mother. He returns to his homeland and mother after a long absence, he knows he is safe, welcome and loved, because for him mother and fatherland are the same: the same womb is the same land from which he came.

The union of mother and fatherland can also be found in the famous poem by Juan Pérez Bonalde Regreso a la patria (Return to the homeland) . Here I leave you a part of that long poem:

Mother, here I am: from my exile I come
to give you with your soul the silent embrace
that I couldn't give you in your agony;
to unburden in your glacial lap
the sharp pain I have in my chest
and realize my absence.
Mother, here I am; on the wings of destiny
I walked away from you one morning,
in pursuit of fortune
that I dreamed for you from the cradle;
but, oh, inhuman luck!
Today I return, weary pilgrim,
and I only bring what I can offer you,
this yellow flower of the road
and this rest of the crying I have left.

This beautiful poem has become a hymn for all the Venezuelans who have left. Here the poetic voice speaks to us of the emotion she feels upon returning to her native country after exile, an emotion that is truncated by the knowledge that her mother has died. The repentant and sad lyrical voice asks her forgiveness for not being by her side in her agony, knowing that it is already too late. The mother has died and with that death, the son dies a little.

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Another poet who dedicated not only a poem but a whole collection of poems to the death of his mother is Jaime Sabines, a Mexican writer who gives us verses that taste of love, but also of pain, tears and memories. The poem XI says so:

Give me your hand, or take your arm, my arm. Get in the car. I will take you for the last walk in the forest.
You wanted to live, I knew it. You insisted that everything was beautiful, but your blood fell like a defeated wall. Your eyes were fading behind you. When you said "let's go back" you were already dead.
What dignity, what an inheritance! You forbid tears now. We have no choice but to be men.

This meaningful poem speaks of the right moment of the mother's death. The actions that the son does to cheer up and lengthen his existence. But any effort, any action, is useless: the mother carries death in her veins. In the end she speaks of the mother's inheritance, of her strength until the end, so that the lyrical voice cannot give itself the luxury of falling, of being weak, of crying.

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Another great Venezuelan writer who wrote to the dead mother was Martha Kornblith. I give you the first stanza of _Poema for my mother's lack:

Mother
now that your spirit
no longer runs through this house
and it's not yours anymore.
because now resentment
is measured in square meters and we play inheritance
as scapegoats
anxiously awaiting
the time of the monopoly.

Mothers are sometimes not only the owners of the house, but also its backbone, its strongest pillar, and when they die, we can see that the houses collapse, the family separates, the great storms begin. In this poem the mother has left and with her death the family begins to fragment. The struggle begins for the goods that remain, for dividing love into a thousand pieces, for showing misery. It is worth quoting a phrase from How Green Was My Valley, which says: My mother was always in a hurry, always the last to start eating and the first to finish. If my father was the head of the family, my mother was the heart.

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When we read a poem that talks about the mother, we don't necessarily talk about love and joy, we can also talk about the sadness of her absence and death, about the distance between her and her children, but although the tone is melancholic and sad, there will always be behind every verse and every word a tribute to the woman who gave us life. Each one of her is unique and incomparable, each poem too. As Sabines said:

It is also very rare that I had a mother. Sometimes I think that I dreamt her too much, I dreamed her so much that I made her. Almost all mothers are creatures of our dreams.

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I hope you have a good mother's day. Remember to vote for @adsactly as a witness and join our server in discord. Until a next smile. ;)

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%ADa_of_the_Mother
https://originalsoy.wordpress.com/2014/10/05/vuelta-a-la-patria-pt-2-juan-antonio-perez-bonalde/
Jaime Sabines. (1994). Poetic anthology. Fondo de Cultura Económica: México.
https://www.poesi.as/eb081.htm
Gina Saraceni (2008). In-Work. Equinox: Venezuela

Written by: @nancybriti

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