The Visionary by Cynthia Sims (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

The Visionary
by Cynthia Sims

We relate to the world
in our preferred
modus operandi.
So what does that mean?
It can mean many things
or not.

Some only see.
Some only hear.
Some only feel.
But some “all knowing”
hail from tiny places
like Brewton, Alabama.

Saying sooths like
“He won’t amount to anything”
while assessing
prospective suitors.
Or correcting teenage declarations
“I want to be an artist”
with, “You want to be
an art teacher.”

Unshakable in their
predictions and prognostications.
Willing to endure scorn,
derision, and gales of laughter
while sporting the raised eyebrow
and an irritating Mona Lisa smile.

Always holding to their guns.
But never holding forth
with “I told you so.”
Admonishments such as,
“You make your own bed”
seem silly at the time.
But continue to fall in
a prolific stream from
red-ruby-lipsticked lips.

The pudgy knowing countenance
with the real mink stole
in the back of her closet,
sits like a solitary stalwart Buddha
on a gold brocade sofa cushion.
Proclaiming her proverbs
with a knowing smugness

*
Forever and ever

PAINTING: The Crystal Ball by John William Waterhouse (1902).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: After my mother passed away in 2017 at the age of 95.5 years, I found this photo in a family album and was immediately transported back to my late teenage years around 1968 when I was ready to leave home. Our relationship was strained by the generation gap between the traditional 1950s housewife and the 1960s know-it-all hippie. We were incommunicado! I could do nothing right, and she thought my life was doomed. So the voice I chose was the hard-headed teenager that I was. Turned out she was right on all counts, but I had to learn the hard way. She was without a doubt the strongest and most self-reliant woman I’ve ever known…my role model.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: My mother, Marjorie Cowart, in the late 1960s, age 48.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Cynthia Sims, a native of Louisiana, is a latecomer to poetry. After retiring, she started to write—as a self-education project based on the mother tongue methods of Shinichi Suzuki. Although she worked as an artist, art teacher, adult education teacher, and counselor, spending years writing technical federal project proposals and final reports…she wrote no poetry.  She holds a BFA from Florida Atlantic University and a Masters from LSU in Counseling. Now four years into her Poetry Writing Project, she has completed 916 poems—with a goal of hitting 1,000 by August 2024. She has spent countless hours reading poetry and listening to contemporary poets, readings and interviews—activities that have served as her sans-university MFA.  Recently, she’s started to investigate publishing some of her own poems. She works almost exclusively in a multimedia format that includes a carefully curated photograph as an integral component of her poem. Currently at work on a set of 100 Monoku poems, she has found poetry to be the perfect tool for mining the subconscious. “The Visionary” is her first poem accepted for publication.