Poets Online Archive
Parenting
June 2008

Having just passed Mother's Day and being it was the month of Father's Day, we took the William Stafford poem "With Kit, Age 7, At The Beach" and prompted readers to think about parenting.

Of course, the range of parenting poems is wide - from "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath to "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps" by Galway Kinnell. It includes poems by parents about their children, and poems by grown children about the parenting they received.

There's more information about this prompt and previous ones, and the opportunity to post your own comments on the Poets Online Blog.

THREE MINUS ONE

When night clamped down and the three
Breathed in their rooms in time to the swirl of the stars
I walked outside their doors and remembered each
Squall when their infant specks awoke to notice
My attention to them drowned in sleep, I swam
Up to their red, open faces to still the fear
That note of panic I heard. I inhabit it now, always
one of the three has flown.

See: He is in the face of the moon's etched valleys
See: He hides under the skirt of the sky
Hear: the coyotes call his name on the arroyo
The hunted are safe in the sound for a time.

The two remain, are huddled in my love, a canopy
So frail it can't repel the swooping owl
That picked the one out of three from me
I feel the claw, all is red.

Meanwhile, in earth time my skin longs
For his lanky bones, I require his presence
as air. Instead a hiss sounds within
A potion of need that simmers
In this space I used to call a heart.

Patty Tomsky

TOMORROW IS GOING TO BE NORMAL

Laura Shovan

HOW TO PAINT YOUR TOENAILS WHEN YOU ARE NINE MONTHS PREGNANT

Bend over.
Bend way, way over, bowing to the weight of the child.
Curl yourself around the bulge of her—
Your spine a ribbon wrapping you both—
Until you see your old friends: your toes
Splayed on the counter,
Pale under the fluorescent lights.
You have ignored them, these months of great expectations
In favor of the zygote, the fundus, the os.
Now they are chipped, half-naked, forlorn.
No starlet would have engaged in this sanctified omphaloskepsis;
being a mother does not mean ceasing to be a woman.
So seize your brightest hue and work fast—
You can't hold this pose much longer.
Fill the blank spaces with bold strokes of color.
Now straighten up
Balance the sweet load before,
Against the bottomless desires within,
And admire, if you can, your handiwork.
Peer past the future your belly holds;
Take note of the perfect scarlet beacons below:
Ten tiny trumpets blaring your intention
To not go gentle into the dawning light
Of motherhood.

Jennifer Rouse

ELEGY

On the day she died, I was smoking bowls of Panama Red with a few friends
in a rundown bungalow and watching Star Trek on TV, so I wasn’t on hand
to offer my obeisance to the corpulent queen. My roommate, who brooked
no calls during his favorite show, took the phone off the hook and steadfastly
refused to recradle it until closing credits were scrolling down the screen.

I would have declined the summons had it come—to attend my grandmother
while she expired under hospital sheets, surrounded by her devoted retinue
of aging daughters. I could picture the scene well enough in my head:
my two aunts hovering over the bed, petitioning her not to depart, my mother
trying to retain her composure, dabbing eyes with a crumpled up Kleenex.

“I tried to call, but the line was busy,” mom later said, “to let you know,
so you could pay your last respects.” The details were filled in afterward:
the fact that Nana was still breathing when the paramedics arrived to hoist
the slumped body where it had fallen onto a litter and ferry it through
the living room, angle it out the door, across the stoop, and down the steps

to the barge that waited at the curb to transport her bulk to Saint Peter’s,
my aunts fluttering behind like wailing pennants in her wake. An hour before,
my grandmother abruptly raised her crippled left arm a final time, the limb
that had to be tenderly shifted from her lap to the armrest of the tatty throne
on which she presided over Lawrence Welk and Ed Sullivan on Sunday nights,

her daughters rubbing her swollen legs with liniment and carrying laden trays
to and from the kitchen. The weight of that arm, its elbow emblazoned
with eczema, frayed a hole in the upholstery that was eventually covered
by a pink heating pad. I remember lifting her bloated ankles onto a hassock,
and fetching the Sunday paper from the porch for her to read, like a good pup,

when I was obliged once a week to pay her homage at the ancient residence
on Hollywood Street. “Look!” she said, rotating her arm like a hall of famer
winding up for a throw. My mother stopped stirring the pot on the stove
and stared as my grandmother rose from her plate. “See,” she proclaimed,
knocking the aluminum walker triumphantly out of her way, “how good

I can stand!” Her elephantine feet encased in purple Scuffies lumbered
thumpishly across the yellowed linoleum, the creaky planks of the parlor floor,
my aunts trailing the billows of her print housedress through the dining room,
past trembling knickknacks bedecking fissured walls, as she led the procession
down the stuffy halls of her kingdom and back into the kitchen where she took

her place again at the head of the table, satisfied that her chandeliered domain
remained intact, her daughters afraid she might fall, afraid they’d be unable to
uphold her onerous body if she did. “It’s a miracle!” one of my aunts blubbered,
exultantly kneading the regal fingers she clutched in a bony paw while the soup
that had been vigorously bubbling on the burner while they were on parade

was dutifully ladled out. My grandmother raised a tarnished silver teaspoon
to her mouth and warned them, “Don’t burn your tongues!” She pursed her lips
to show them how to blow soup cool as if they were poor addlebrained ninnies
needing to be schooled before her spine suddenly stiffened and she toppled.
Two spinster aunts, who sacrificed their lives catering to her royal whims,

inherited the enchanted castle, the clogged pipes, the leaky roof, the spluttering
furnace, the tufts of thorn and thistle populating an unruly realm overrun
with weeds where they would spend their days recalling their vows, striving
to maintain the home they turned into a shrine, grieving for the stern matriarch
who had entombed them in the decrepit house her imperious spirit ruled.

Steve Smith

LESSONS

My mother sits beside me on the bench,
attends as at no other time, barely breathes.
I want to play the way she does:
water rushing over boulders, wind sighing among leaves,
dappled light, a forest floor, a single eagle soaring
over peaks, the beating of a mighty heart.

But keys that she makes sing are merely wood,
inert beneath my fingers.
My Mazurka lurches, stumbles,
crippled in my hesitating hands.
C sharp! I flinch. My finger shifts – white to black.
The chord resolves.

My mother practiced every day, half an hour of piano
before breakfast, half an hour before dinner, violin.
She does not insist with me the way her mother did;
my lessons simply stop when I complain.

My mother does not hear my secret music.
I play not printed notes but the beating
of her heart. I sit and sway, my fingers
rushing over boulders just above the keys,
my body sighing among leaves, eyes closed to see
the dappled light, my spirit soaring over mountain peaks.
Alone and silent, I play my mother’s music.

Kathy Nelson

LEAVING HOME

I don't know you as well as I did.
Maybe I don't know you at all.

You floated inside and I didn't know you.
You cried, and I  still didn't know you.

When did I know you?
When you played ball?

When I read bedtime stories?
When we held hands crossing the street?

Did I know one day I would turn
and you would be gone?

Do you remember when you left.
I don’t recall saying goodbye.

Nancy Gerber

FATHERING

Sons go away to become men.
The good things all seem to be moments.
The bad things are large and long lasting.

I cried when I realized that I had given
my flaws to that inner city of the self
in the blood of the child.

That April morning - call it Fate, God or Luck -
that he was not where he should have been
so a bullet didn't find him.

It's hard to turn in the direction of the skid
even when you know it's the right thing to do.

The wind rose as marks on a compass,
knots on a rope to measure speed.
A dead reckoning.

The meridian passes through three stages of truth:
ridicule, violent opposition, then acceptance.

I work more hours than my father did,
and I'm older than he ever lived to be.

There is a vertigo of age turning
with ancestors: farmers, hunters, soldiers.

To the oyster, what is the pearl?
No rare and valued thing.
A reminder of pain.

Ken Ronkowitz

William Edgar Stafford (January 17, 1914 - August 28, 1993) was an American poet and noted pacifist, as well as the father of the poet and essayist Kim Stafford. A long-time resident of Oregon, he and his writings are sometimes identified with the Pacific Northwest.

He received a B.A. from the University of Kansas and his M.A. from the University of Kansas in 1947. In 1948, his master's thesis, the prose memoir Down In My Heart, was published and he moved to Oregon to teach at Lewis and Clark College. In 1954, he received a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa.

In 1970, he was named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position that is now known as Poet Laureate.He died in Lake Oswego, Oregon on August 28, 1993, having written a poem that morning containing the line "Be ready for what God sends."