For Talking Writing by Carol Dorf
Mother’s Day requires poems. This selection of poems is from work that is available online, so the first stanza or so of each is here along with a link to the entire poem. Two of these poems, Nellie Wong’s “Mama, Come Back” and Lucille Clifton’s “[if mama/could see],” are from the child’s point of view. The others are from the mother’s point of view. However, in this ever-shifting dynamic, in a number of the poems there are shifts and turns.
Why did you leave
now that I am learning you?
The landlady next door
how she apologizes
for my rough brown skin
to her tenant from Hong Kong
as if I were her daughter,
as if she were you.
... [if mama / could see]
i
if mama
could see
she would see
lucy sprawling
limbs of lucy
decorating the
backs of chairs
lucy hair
holding the mirrors up
that reflect odd
aspects of lucy.
...
To a Daughter Leaving Home
by Linda Pastan
When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you ....
We pace each other for a long time.I packed my anger with the beef jerky.
You are the baby on the mountain. I am
in a cold stream where I led you.
... The Nursery
by Fanny Howe
The baby
was made in a cell
in the silver & rose underworld.
Invisibly prisoned
in vessels & cords, no gold
for a baby; instead
eyes, and a sudden soul, twelve weeks
old, which widened its will.
...
Demeter and her daughter Persephone:
every woman tells this story with her mother.
Temptation of the thin-skinned juice-filled seeds,
and following that God back to Hades,
wrapping arms around his leathery waist,
as the motorcycle shoots through time and space.
We return to mother with our children,
but she puts the plates of soup in front of them,
while we peel fruit, and rinse scummy glasses.
...
Toth Farry
by Sharon Olds
In the back of the charm-box, in a sack, the baby
canines and incisors are mostly chaff,
by now, split kernels and acicular down, no
whole utensils left: half
an adz; half a shovel, in its broken
handle a marrow well of the will
to dig and bite. And the enamel hems ...Kill School
by Fran Richey
That was the summer he rappelled
down mountains on rope
that from a distance looked thin
as the dragline of a spider,
barely visible, the tension
he descended
into the made-up
state of Pineland
with soldiers from his class ...
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