Mamica

This is one of the tenderest of Slovenian songs about mothers, and it works by likening mummy, verse by verse, to three great lights. She is like the dawn, smiling in the morning while her child still plays among its dreams; like the little sun, with a golden heart, a ray shining from heaven’s gates; and like the moon, keeping watch through the long nights so that her child sleeps peacefully and without a care. Each image places the mother among the very things that light and warm the world.

Running through it is a simple, fierce vow that any child understands: I’ll never give my mummy up — I have but one in all the wide world. It is a song children sing to their mothers, offered on Slovenian parenting sites as a Mother’s Day gift, and it has passed so fully into popular singing that folk-song portals file it as traditional. The words, though, have an author: Franjo Neubauer (1872–1945), a poet and priest from Mirna in Lower Carniola, whom Mitja Gobec’s 2018 collection of Slovenian songs turned folk credits for the text, set to what it calls a Croatian folk tune; no composer of the melody is named. Whoever first sang it, it says something every child means: that of all the lights in the sky, none shines quite like their own mother.