Free Verse

I'm Proud of You, Mum

December 30, 2025

My mum waits for me on the blue porch.

She sits in the wooden rocking chair,

Humming a song about birds and trees.

She waits for me to come home.

She’s going to wait for a long time.

I’m going to wait a long time.

We both survived my dad.

Bloody and weary,

We crawled out of the life

That he occupied.

She crawled away from that house

And emerged a free woman.

I dragged myself away from that house

And remained an orphan.

I know my mum was just trying to survive him.

But that doesn’t change the fact

I had to survive her too.

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▾ This Poem's Voice

Deeply personal autobiographical narrative about family trauma and survival.

Multiple interconnected ideas: waiting, survival, trauma, parental abandonment densely woven.

Strongly negative: grief, abandonment, weary survival, unresolved pain dominate.

Moderate intensity; raw emotional force tempered by reflective pacing and restraint.

Approximately 24 lines; falls within 16-30 line range.

Metaphor of crawling/emergence, personification of house, some poetic restraint with concrete imagery.

Pure lyric internal voice; intimate first-person reflection on personal experience.

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