Grocery Shopping With My Mother
Kevin Powell
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I got to go back to church again too, God is everywhere But they need to accept God That's what you should say Dear God Please do not Take my mother From me Any time soon I am not ready God I do not know what I would be without her She has been my mother and my father Since she pushed and pulled me through her earth The way a jagged little pill Shoves its way 'round the mouth of history I love my mother like I love breathing air Even when she bruises me With her words with her rage God, my ma has forever bruised me With her words with her rage When I was a horribly lonely only child I did not understand why She behaved as she did But when she got sick Lord, really sick A few years back I was terrified Of losing my mother I had her Speed-dialed to the hospital There in Jersey And sprinted me As fast as I could to be with her Lawd Ma said It was the first time She had been in a hospital Since she had given birth And there she was Flailing like a caught fish on a frosty metal table In an off-white hospital gown Her belly had Swoll so big It looked like she Was pregnant with Me another time And that, God, is how it began Our regular trips To the grocery store Because ma could not Move without immense pain Without waddling Like a penguin In the middle of a summer hurricane Dear God Dear God Dear God Dear God Please help me Dear God My mother does Not know that I often walk behind her On purpose As she grabs A pound of hamburger A bag of sugar A loaf of bread A box of cereal Aisle after aisle My heart spills a bucket of suds Aisle after aisle My eyes spill two buckets of suds Like that day she Slid as a baseball runner would onto the floor Lord In her senior citizen apartment From her favorite chair And it took my entire back strength To boost my mother's plump frame To get her up to her recliner And before I could God There we were one-two-three-four-five seconds Her on the floor me on the floor When she and I Stared at each other As we may have stared At each other when I was A scared baby and her a scared young woman And in that very Moment I wanted to tell My mother what she meant to me But could not because My mother and I have never hugged Have never kissed Have never said I love you And here I was the caretaker Of a person who did not care to be touched by anyone Dear God My mother's legs throb bad Ma religiously rubs ointments on them Like she is scrubbing grime from her bathtub She repeatedly refers to herself as being sick She says she an old woman She says she tired so so tired She prays to you God from can't see to can't see She says you Lord will work a supernatural miracle And heal her body oh Lawd She says blood of Jesus each chance she thinks of it Like Jesus fixin' to be Superman And jump off that prickly cross My mother's altar Is the shopping cart at the supermarket She baptizes the handle with one of her wipes She cusses at me When I ask her to pull her mask over her nose She smooshes Her worn black purse into the child seat Where I once drooped my skinny limbs She clutches tight the cart Says it helps her balance Ma is afraid to fall Ma ain't gonna fall in front of no strangers My mother's power Is in the steering of the shopping cart She pushes it forward the way A truck driver inches their tractor Through bumper-to-bumper traffic She wobbles slowly from the cart when she Spots an item she needs Lord Three peaches Four red apples Five bananas A package of chocolate chip cookies A bunch of collard greens A carton of orange juice Dear God I straighten the crooked cart That ma always leaves in the middle of an aisle Hold my pocketbook Watch my pocketbook My mother chides me loudly When she wobbles from the cart Smashed inside her pocketbook Are those wipes and tissue and Cash and coins and her food stamp card And clipped coupons lots of clipped coupons And her crinkled grocery list Neatly written In blue ink Ma has the list mainly in her head But sometimes God glances at it When her memory Is a throwback to the beautiful little dark-skinned girl On that porch in South Carolina But they did not tell little Dark-skinned girls God they were beautiful back then My Lord, Ma thought only White people and light-skinned Black people Were good-looking They did not tell Little dark-skinned girls They could be anything So ma thought her life was Munching the raccoon meat Her desperate father shot and skinned Life, God, was daddy beating her And her three sisters and brother And her mother As if they were slaves on an auction block Because life for every Black was one big beating Ma thought life was signs and railroad Tracks that told her Where she could go What her slipped joints could not do Was being branded "Tar baby" and "spade" And "jiggaboo" and "spearchucker" And ugly real ugly By the local White folks And the local Negroes too Just because she was born tobacco brown like James Brown Ma ain't know nothin' About no sexism or no classism Ma ain't know nothin' About bell hooks or Toni Morrison or Alice Walker But she knew, my mama, God, knew Yes God, she knew She was Celie before Celie was Celie in "The Color Purple" This God Is why To this day I believe my mother loves Whoopi Goldberg Because when ma sees Whoopi in the movies She sees herself crashing through The broken glass of a dream deferred This God Is why Black people got therapy sessions We name Field hollers Spirituals The underground railroad The blues Jazz Church Dance The chitlin' circuit Prayer circles Funk Hip-hop Holy ghosts Barbershops Hair salons Black Twitter Talkin' in tongues Laughter The soul food We squeezed between our chained ankles Lord And transmitted with us from Africa to the plantations Ma be sayin' We don't know nothin' 'bout no Africa We ain't African Ma don't know Africa all up in her Whenever she talks about the fish She gonna lather and fry Lord About chocolate cake God She sacredly crowns with pecans About potato salad She will punctuate with sweet pickles About wild and buttery cornbread Surrounded and lassoed Lord from scratch Dear God Food is my mother's best friend God Because my ma Ain't got no friends Except her sister Cathy and me Food is my ma's best friend But the food has left her body wretched Like the planet With diabetes With high-blood pressure With mysterious things God she won't discuss Dear mother You are real mysterious With all those doctor visits Like you're a bow-legged root woman Plotting potions While lurking behind a sabal palm tree Dear mother You are real mysterious With the inflamed whip marks of your past Held hostage in your bedroom drawer Dear mother You are real mysterious While heavy living room curtains Smother your sunlight and your loneliness But you are not alone You are not alone Ma Ma, you are not alone We are moon twins Emotionally eating our way To the promised land You told me food is your happiness You begged me Mother not to take away your happiness I will not mother I will not I see your beauty and your genius In the way you boil the water In the way you season the food In the way you create kitchen magic As you did when I was a boy I smell the joy on your house dress I feel the joy when you crunch and chew I sense the divine, God, I miss it, I feel it God, the divine, When my mother, you, suck on that chicken bone And I know, I know, I know Lord, When the time comes For God to look herself in the mirror She will see you Mirror Such a long ways from home When you gotta go grocery shopping again This week I ain't gonna buy much Maybe the following week or next month, you know
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Written by: Bryan Johnson, Kevin Powell, Tyneshia Hill
Lyrics © DistroKid
Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind
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"Grocery Shopping With My Mother Lyrics." Lyrics.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 27 Apr. 2024. <https://www.lyrics.com/lyric-lf/12767773/Kevin+Powell/Grocery+Shopping+With+My+Mother>.
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