I Am Becoming My Mother

I Am Becoming My Mother

Lorna Goodison

New Beacon Books

1986

I Am Becoming My Mother is a book of poetry by Lorna Goodison: a Jamaican poet and leading West Indian writer. Apart from issues of home and exile, her work also addresses the power of art to explore and reconcile opposites and contradictions in the Caribbean historical experience.

Yellow/brown woman
Fingers smelling always of onions

My mother raises rare blooms
and waters them with tea
her birth waters sang like rivers
my mother is now me.

My mother had a linen dress
the colour of the sky
and stored lace and damask
tablecloths
to pull shame out of her eye.

I am becoming my mother
brown/yellow woman
fingers smelling always of onions.

I Am Becoming My Mother by Lorna Goodison