
“We called her Mother Earth. Because she gave birth to us, and then we sucked her dry.”
Ode to the Spirit of Earth in Autumn, st. 14.
“We called her Mother Earth. Because she gave birth to us, and then we sucked her dry.”
Life & Times of Michael K (1983)
Context: He closed his eyes and tried to recover in his imagination the mudbrick walls and reed roof of her stories, the garden of prickly pear, the chickens scampering for the feed scattered by the little barefoot girl. And behind that child, in the doorway, her face obscured by shadow, he searched for a second woman, the woman from whom his mother had come into the world. When my mother was dying in the hospital, he thought, when she knew her end was coming, it was not me she looked to but someone who stood behind me: her mother or the ghost of her mother. To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her hand and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end.
“The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children.”
Source: 2001: A Space Odyssey
Interview with Oprah Winfrey
On Eugene Schumann http://www.amazon.com/review/R280VQKJ4LC7OI
"To my mother" [Meiner Mutter] (May 1920), trans. John Willett in Poems, 1913-1956, p. 49
Poems, 1913-1956 (1976)