I am grateful to my mother for teaching me magic.

I am grateful to my mother for teaching me magic. 

She showed me how to pluck the hidden meanings in the words people spoke.
The chants they tried to weave, the blessings to search for, the curses that threatened to choke. 
She traced the hillside of my nose and made me trace hers, too.
“We share the same valleys and mounds,” she said. “It is a privilege for others to view.”
She taught me the rolling and jutting sounds of our tongue.
They say it is like “falling stones”, the language ancient mountains had sung.
She taught me how to read palms, how each line held stories in such clarity.
The leathery surfaces that taught you respect, the supple softness that taught you immaturity.
She equipped me with the recipes that made the soul dance,
And I saw how food mended families, how it gave sullen hearts a second chance.
She made me feel for the closeness of God, closer than the pulse in my neck.
She versed me on the miracles of our religion, their divine conquest and the disbelievers’ wreck. 
And when I was young she whispered to me the tales of our ancestry and kin, 
The prayers they uttered to produce swords against evil, the elders who taught the Qur’an to the djinn. 
I see how everyday she reveals the tact and tricks to snuff the blitzing storms of men,
How to curl the flame in your stomach, how to lay gold in the cracks time and time again.
To hold my tongue in anger and release my anguish in a scalding shower.
“We women can handle it,” she would say. “The heat lets our dragons breathe out their power.”
She perhaps did not mean to teach me this, but I saw how she wove magic into my hair.
Fingertips tight with strength, she would braid with oil and truth, the sore stability a reassurance of care. 
She sees me as unruly and unkempt, still a girl who needs direction, a full moon not yet waning.
So she insists on leaving traces of herself in my scalp, a hope of her life sustaining.
I will remember how she told me of sisterhood being found in generosity, how we must be shepherds of kindness.
How true gossip is a protective warning, how pride can be an incurable blindness. 

There are things I do not understand of my mother, spells that seem senseless and actions that feel futile.
I say her lessons are stale and wilting, the world beyond her gardens becoming most brutal. 
But she tells me, though the world changes, her magic is cut from the fabric of life, eternally resolved. 
It is ivy that clings to walls, moss that grows over dirt - it is hardiness that is never dissolved.
“When there is only cruelty and ruin waiting for you, when darkness caves into your bones,
Then you will see the way my magic pushes at your feet and spine, to keep you upright and moving with the strength that it hones.”
Sometimes she is confused and teaches me how to grow generationally poisoned seeds.
And so, though I sit and copy how she tends to her meadow, I am careful to pull out those polluting weeds. 
I finally understand that the magic she teaches me is ancient, its roots frail though iron at core,
And so I will be patient and nurture the feet of my mother, for she showed me their beauty, like white lapping shores. 

By Aleena.

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