Drafted: Mother Was Not Smooth, a Sestina

By Stephanie Mesler

Mother was not smooth; she was not genteel.

Mother was sharp, like a needle in the eye,

and blunt, like a butcher’s mallet.

Born into a motherless home, she learned early to cope with solitude.

Alone with a man who had not planned on raising any child, much less a daughter,

She learned to love silence

Early morning darkness enveloped her in silence.

Gowned evenings among the genteel,

away from the home and daughter

that demanded more than just the mother’s watchful eye,

used up all of her sociability, stole her grace and made her seek solitude,

wherever it could be found. Her mornings, she guarded with a tone that crushed like a mallet,

“Why are you awake? Go back to bed,” decreed the mallet.

Don’t you know this is mother’s alone time? Silence!

She sat on the sofa, smoking in the dark, surrounded in her solitude.

Here, she was herself, for herself; bereft of the veneer of the genteel

politician artist preacher’s wife. In her jaundiced eye,

There was no love for the home, the man, or the daughter.

I was the invisible daughter -

she, who learned to avoid the mallet -

she, who was also a needle in the eye.

I moved from room to room, through pea soup silence,

cutting through the air, like the well mannered and genteel

cut through societal barriers and silence.

I learned from the lonliest how to embrace solitude.

My own points got sharper and my tongue grew terse; I am my mother’s daughter,

in the end, so much more than my father’s - he valued the elegant genteel,

even as his own words cut to the bone and his fists crushed like a mallet.

In a daughter, he valued only bragging rights and silence.

I was to be evidence of his own value, proof that he could create what was first seen in his mind’s eye.

Mother looked the other way when he punched me in the eye,

an event that led to a full week’s solitude.

I was condemned to missing school, unending silence

at home, time for my wound to heal, so no one would look at me and see the daughter

of a monster and his mallet.

I was captive to that blinding veneer genteel.

I have grown to be both sharp and smooth, the daughter

of a mallet, who is, myself, a blunt, hard, damaging, self-protective mallet.

I am also capable of gentle, gentlewomanly gentility. I am needle Genteel.

Drafted