mama’s words are always true

don’t walk in the dark,
mama scolds,
why the heck you walk
after sunset and
before sunrise,
girl?

oh stop
fussin’ at me,
i’m fine, i snap.

what snaps back at me
from i don’t know where
inside my own self:
why you walk
in ten kinds of
dark
even with sunshine
bright’s can be
middle of a day,
when you got
a heartlamp
to light your way,
girl?
heartlamp
never burns out,
not once,
not never,
girl

—dotty seiter

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Notes about poem and art:
• “mama’s words” began as a haiku, shifted to a modified haiku, and eventually left the haiku form altogether, but it was the original constraints of haiku that pushed back at me again and again to clarify and refine and revise until i found what wanted expression.
The title comes from a tongue-in-cheek mantra my mom was known to repeat to remind us kids that we might not know everything there was to know (and that she did).
The opening line holds recent words of hers—I think she literally meant to admonish me against walking in the dark of predawn as I am wont to do, but when I heard her words I knew a deeper truth immediately.
• I Start to Speak is a tiny scribble grid I made while on a trip to Virginia earlier in the month. It fulfilled my wish to play a bit with travel art that would be soothing to create, could be picked up and put down at a moment’s notice, and would require only a few easily-packed supplies.