Poems of This Day for Mothers

There is a wide range of ways poets have written about mothers. Poets.org collected a few examples as we approach Mother's Day.

I have posted several times poems concerning mothers.

Burt Kimmelman's poem "Taking Dinner to My Mother" served as a model for one of our writing prompts. Looking at it again now and thinking about another post I made the year my mother would be 92 feels strange to reread because my mother didn't make it to her December birthday that year.

I wrote about a Mary Oliver poem and how my mother might react to it. Burt's poem is knowingly about his mother just before she died.

But Mother's Day shouldn't be a sad day, even if your mother is gone, it is a time to think of the happier moments. Maybe read some funny poems by Hal Sirowitz from his collection Mother Said.
Or recall something as in Li-Young Lee's "I Ask My Mother to Sing" or this old poem for children by Robert Louis Stevenson.

To Any Reader

As from the house your mother sees
You playing round the garden trees,
So you may see, if you will look
Through the windows of this book,
Another child, far, far away,
And in another garden, play.
But do not think you can at all,
By knocking on the window, call
That child to hear you. He intent
Is all on his play-business bent.
He does not hear; he will not look,
Nor yet be lured out of this book.
For, long ago, the truth to say,
He has grown up and gone away,
And it is but a child of air
That lingers in the garden there.

But my favorite poem for my mom might be one by Billy Collins about a small gift we might give on this day as a child before we knew "that you can never repay your mother," I made at least one of the lanyards that Billy wrote about giving to his mom and I found it after she died in a wooden box that I had made in Cub Scouts along with some other small gifts I had given her.  I was just as sure of their value as Billy. And we were right.

News

tr. from Dushyant Kumar's 'Suchna'

Yesterday, Ma told me --
"Her marriage has been arranged,"
  standing there, I smiled, silent,
an' back in my room, I cried, there
  will be two worlds to me now, always,
  - my room and my home.

Dushyant Kumar

Beds

- there've been many,
and I've sworn all of them to secrecy,
hoping mattresses keep their promise.

The one in Stokey

in the house behind the
Abney Park Cemetery

to which my mother, calling from Lucknow,
had said - "When you sleep, do not lie
facing the cemetery,"

though, often
in the evenings

I'd look at our backyard fence
running against the 18th century graves

- where an angel, an urn, a lion,
all contracted in cement, kept
an Anglican hymn-maker, kept 17 year old
world-war veterans, kept a girl who
"left us so suddenly and so irrevocably
in grief" -

and I did not think it was anything
particularly serious to be
facing them while
I slept.

My German and Greek room-mates
often partied, "facing the cemetery."


A year later, the single-bed in King's Cross,

on the fifth floor,
floated above police sirens
and bus horns,

and was stuck to the right wall of
the room that I'd expressly asked "should. face. outside."

the hostel warden - this nice white guy - was surprised,
"you're the first one to ask for a room facing the road,"
"I like the noise," I said. I did not say I'm from a bigger city,
 I'd sooner die than face the "serene," that
little patch of green for more than a day.

He smirked but let me have my choice.

That bed afforded the view
 of Constable churches, of a Punjabi grocer,
a car rental and a Tesco,

and it was on this bed
where we managed to do it
for the first time,

using face-cream as lube.

Sometime that year,
the bed in your downtown house
near Battery Park,

that I knew only for a night
while visiting New York,

where I made plans which were
(presciently) smaller than my hands,

where I looked down into your city

where even
the parking-lot at mid-night
seemed unbelievable to me,

where the bed, holding my knees,
and your umber skin, as you slept,
told me that the tense of desire
is always the future,

one in which no plan survives,
no suture holds,
no love keeps,

one in which you leave me, always,
so suddenly and so irrevocably
in grief

that night after night
beds now
are of a kind,

that have very little to do
with sleeping.

B.V. Hospital, Thane

They come on a trolley, the Gods,
pushed on each floor of the hospital
till all the patients & their relatives make
their own blends of medicine and faith,
as they fold (without thinking?) hands;
I was told: "Next 48 hrs. are critical."

I weigh it in my mouth, again, 'critical,'
the word now sounds like prayer for Gods,
and holding prescriptions & bills, my hands
learn each wall, each bench the hospital
has, the next thing the doctor said, "Faith,
have faith," & I didn't know what to make

of Gods so out of place, or what to make
of doctors, who when dealing with "critical
patients" must at some point turn to faith,
their oath still an old "call to all the gods
and goddesses to witness" here (B.V. Hospital)
all the "power and judgment" of their hands;

or is it like when I first felt her hands
after three days of not-knowing, of "make
or break," she breathed on her own, this hospital
then was full of idols, "No longer critical?"
I asked, and when they nodded, the Gods
wherever, whoever they be, I gifted faith

so readily, like threads around trees, faith
spun in reams and reams of red hand-
-made cloth that cradles those Gods,
who made (without thinking?) small make-
-shift things for us, and (this is critical)
called it living, and sometimes, in hospitals

when we try to keep their word, the hospitals
become sanctums, and once flappable, faith,
pig-headed, remains, & even in those critical
hours, when the blood refuses and hands
over the heart for little countdowns to make
the claim, at that point between us and Gods,

hospitals are little games, where the Gods
play over our faith, between skies, till they make
us fold (was it critical?), tremulously, our hands.

I Ask My Mother to Sing

I Ask My Mother to Sing


She begins, and my grandmother joins her.
Mother and daughter sing like young girls.
If my father were alive, he would play
his accordion and sway like a boat.

I've never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace,
nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch
the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers
running away in the grass.

But I love to hear it sung;
how the waterlilies fill with rain until
they overturn, spilling water into water,
then rock back, and fill with more.

Both women have begun to cry.
But neither stops her song.

by Li-Young Lee

via The Writers Almanac
from his collection, Rose