mother's day

 
Three generations of children removed from their mothers. Removal from country, the mother.
Ali Cobby Eckermann finds her country again without knowing she needed it, as if something invisible has drawn her toward it. In her early thirties she also finds her birth mother. She says of that first meeting at Canberra airport with its floral carpet, that as she walked toward her mother who was standing there waiting holding a bunch of flowers, she felt like she was walking knee deep through flowers.
This collection of poetry by Ali Cobby Eckermann, published by Giramondo, is titled Inside my Mother. It is the result of grieving for her mother.
Through the sadness there is the drip, drip, the sounds of country. 
Finding the words to weave the story into poetry, what was lost is reclaimed, dignity is restored and meaning takes root, flowers. 
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/earshot/inside-my-mother-ali-cobby-eckermann/7319198 
 

The Brain That Changes Itself

'The irony of this new discovery is that for hundreds of years educators did seem to sense that children's brains had to be built up through exercises of increasing difficulty that strengthened brain functions. Up through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a classical education often included rote memorization of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthened the auditory memory (hence thinking in language) and an almost fanatical attention to handwriting, which probably helped strengthen motor capacities and thus not only helped handwriting but added speed and fluency to reading and speaking. Often a great deal of attention was paid to exact elocution and to perfecting the pronunciation of words. Then  in the 1960s educators dropped such traditional exercises from the curriculum, because they were too rigid, boring, and "not relevant." But the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity that many students had to systematically exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols. For the rest of us, their disappearance may have contributed to the general decline of eloquence, which requires memory and  a level of auditory brainpower unfamiliar to us now.'
Norman Doidge, 2007, The brain that changes itself, Scribe Publications, Victoria (2008)

T. S. Eliot, 1921, 'The Sacred Wood', Tradition and the Individual Talent

'Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.'