This article refers to:
Title: Mother
Author: Gottfried M. Heuer, PhD
Journal: Psychoanalytic Perspectives
Bibilometrics: Volume 13, Number 2, pages 243–244
DOI: 10.1080/1551806X.2016.1156442
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
In the above contribution to the Creative Literary Arts section, published in issue 13(2) of Psychoanalytic Perspectives, a typographical error regrettably appeared in the poem which altered the author’s intended meaning.
The corrected stanza appears below.
No,
this is not
what I feel
when I think of you …
You, mother, Mutti,
in my mother-tongue,
you gave me
the gift of life.
Without you
there would be no I,
and: I love
being alive.
How can I hope
to ever thank you
sufficiently for that?
You,
you, and, of course,
my father, with God’s grace
and blessings,
knew each other, and—
conceived;
conceived, and you
gave birth,
to me—
at a time
when all around us
there was hell,
doubly so:
the hell of Nazi-Germany,
and the inferno
of its cataclysmic end
in war:
bombs, burning houses,
and dead bodies in the streets
of my hometown
in Northern Germany.
Amidst all this,
you three,
Mutti, Papa, God (he and/or she),
created me;
and,
you named me Gottfried,
which is God’s peace.
That is—
were you aware of this?
Sorry, silly question—you
followed Martin Luther,
who supposedly had vouched,
‘Even if I knew
the world were to end tomorrow,
I would still
plant an apple-tree
today.’
Liebe Mutti,
my dear mother, I
am that apple-tree
of yours.