an Imayo
My Mother’s Chandelier
shedding light on love and aging
It’s a black wrought iron sun, beaming crystal tears
pellucid as compassion, orbiting deep space
from my childhood home to here, where the dim switch balks.
This sun’s not setting — shine, Mom. Join your fellow stars.
©Jenine Bsharah Baines 2021
This is the second poem of my “Cape Cod series” — inspired by my mother’s chandelier hanging like a sun in the center of her light-filled apartment. A mother is so often a sun for her children; mine certainly is for me.
Thank you, Somsubhra Banerjee, for the nudge to tackle an Imayo.
Thank you, team at Literary Impulse, too — Priyanka Srivastava, Nachi Keta, Elisabeth Khan, Somsubhra Banerjee. I look forward to exploring yet more unfamiliar poetic terrain with you.
The word “imayo” struck me for a silly or not-so-silly reason — the word “may” within it and the vowels “Io” spelling a moon of Jupiter. Thank you, dearest readers, for being both eternal spring and a luminous moon in the universe called my soul.
