Mama, You Didn’t Raise Me Well
You sold me the dream of durable joy
Mama, you didn’t raise me well,
’cause you mislead me that there is no hell,
you made me think that nothing can go wrong
as well as love is at the battlefront.
Mama, you didn’t raise me well,
you left me unprepared for the death knell
that sounds within the beings and the things
when the clock’s blade cuts open necks and wings.
Mama, I wish you raised me right,
to cynism and upstart to give my plight,
to move through life with power, merciless.
Instead, you sold me dreams of the dispossessed.
Ana-Maria Schweitzer 2020
This poem is my invitation to readers to revisit Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel “ The Dispossessed.” Here is just a sample of this extraordinary writing:
“A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the…
