My maternal grandfather was a writer and poet as was my mother and her sister and brother. My father was a writer and journalist.
It would seem that I did not inherit any of the rhyming and just a bit of my father’s writing.
I never liked poetry because in school I was forced to memorize it and I could not. My mother spent long evening hours making me repeat a homework poem I had to memorize. It was only here in Vancouver that I discovered the beauty of poetry. I read it and I love finding poems that I can match with my photographs.
In 1963 while attending the University of the Americas in Mexico City in my literature class I had a teacher who looked like Robert Frost and had been his friend for years. I sat in the back row bored. Obviously I was more of an idiot than I may be now.
It is my pleasure to place here the only poem ever written to me. No passionate girlfriend ever did. It was my mother.
I was doing my military service in the Argentine Navy and she wrote Prayers from where she was teaching in Veracruz, Mexico.
Here is my poor translation:
To Alex – Prayers
It may be that you will return
Or perhaps you might not
But I want you to know
That I will be here waiting for
News from you
Every once in a while
I wish for you the best
That life may bring you
A brilliant career
A woman to love you
As you deserve
For all this I pray
My son, may God bless you
That the little Virgin protect you
So that you will always have
Integrity and be good and fair
All this and much more I wish for you.
My mother may not have gotten it all especially about my brilliant career but she did get Rosemary right. Two years after this poem I returned to Mexico and found a woman to love me
What I could not have ever guessed that there was also an instant love between them. My mother was not that mother-in-law. They got along like mother and daughter.
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| Rosemary, my mother and Alexandra - 1968 - Veracruz Mexico |
Rosemary and I watched my mother die in bed and I will never forget that because we were so broke, Rosemary's parents paid for the funeral.
I now have no memory of the story behind the title of my mother's book of poetry, Things and Thoughts that we had bound in Mexico City by a Frenchman called Millioud. Because my father was a divorced man and divorce was not allowed in Argentina my mother and father married in Uruguay. Legally she could not retain the Waterhouse-Hayward so all her documents had her maiden name Filomena de Irureta Goyena. I added "de Hayward".
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