She Walks in Beauty Read online

infinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience to

  the remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be

  remembered too violently,

  your thorns are the best part of you.

  Eagle Poem

  JOY HARJO

  To pray you open your whole self

  To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon

  To one whole voice that is you.

  And know there is more

  That you can’t see, can’t hear;

  Can’t know except in moments

  Steadly growing, and in languages

  That aren’t always sound but other

  Circles of motion.

  Like eagle that Sunday morning

  Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky

  In wind, swept our hearts clean

  With sacred wings.

  We see you, see ourselves and know

  That we must take the utmost care

  And kindness in all things.

  Breathe in, knowing we are made of

  All this, and breathe, knowing

  We are truly blessed because we

  Were born, and die soon within a

  True circle of motion,

  Like eagle rounding out the morning

  Inside us.

  We pray that it will be done

  In beauty.

  In beauty.

  MOTHERHOOD

  MY CHILDREN ARE too wonderful and too old for me to write about them without getting into trouble. But I can certainly say, like everyone does, that becoming a mother is the best thing that ever happened to me. Having a child defines us for the rest of our lives. No matter what else we do, we will always be that person’s mother. We give our children the gift of ourselves, and they give us so much more in return—especially when they are teenagers! Each mother-child relationship teaches us our limitations and our strengths. It changes us in constantly unfolding ways and entwines us in the unpredictable mystery of another life.

  The poems in this section start and end with a blessing. They begin with “A Cradle Song” by W. B. Yeats, a lullaby of wonder from a parent to a newborn child. The last poem is Lucille Clifton’s “blessing the boats,” in which she wishes safe passage for a child whose mother’s arms can no longer protect her from the world.

  In motherhood, like poetry, the particular becomes universal. Each detail evokes an entire world of memories. In “Socks,” Sharon Olds describes the feeling of being needed as she lifts her lazy son’s leg to put on his sock, and every mother can feel the dead weight of that heavy leg with her own muscle memory.

  There are also poems about mothers from the child’s point of view. In “Clearances,” the special closeness Seamus Heaney felt when he and his mother peeled potatoes together reminds us that sharing the mundane duties of daily life builds a lifetime of love between parent and child.

  The old-fashioned poem “Somebody’s Mother” by Mary Dow Brine, shares an important theme with Elizabeth Alexander’s modern works “The Dream That I Told My Mother-in-Law” and “Ode.” One of the great gifts of motherhood is the ability to see other people’s children as our own, and to feel that the responsibility of caring for them is ours.

  My aunt Eunice, who founded the Special Olympics, used to quote Henry Ward Beecher, who wrote, “A mother’s heart is a child’s schoolroom.” Our mothers are our first teachers, and we teach others the same lessons we learn from them. As a child, when your mother believes in you, you believe in yourself, and when that happens, there is nothing you can’t do. As a mother, that is the greatest gift we can give to a child.

  A Cradle Song

  W. B. YEATS

  The angels are stooping

  Above your bed;

  They weary of trooping

  With the whimpering dead.

  God’s laughing in Heaven

  To see you so good;

  The Sailing Seven

  Are gay with His mood.

  I sigh that kiss you,

  For I must own

  That I shall miss you

  When you have grown.

  Notes from the Delivery Room

  LINDA PASTAN

  Strapped down,

  victim in an old comic book,

  I have been here before,

  this place where pain winces

  off the walls

  like too bright light.

  Bear down a doctor says,

  foreman to sweating laborer,

  but this work, this forcing

  of one life from another

  is something that I signed for

  at a moment when I would have signed anything.

  Babies should grow in fields;

  common as beets or turnips

  they should be picked and held

  root end up, soil spilling

  from between their toes—

  and how much easier it would be later,

  returning them to earth.

  Bear up . . . bear down . . . the audience

  grows restive, and I’m a new magician

  who can’t produce the rabbit

  from my swollen hat.

  She’s crowning, someone says,

  but there is no one royal here,

  just me, quite barefoot,

  greeting my barefoot child.

  Socks

  SHARON OLDS

  I’ll play Ninja Death with you

  tonight, if you buy new socks, I say

  to our son. After supper he holds out his foot,

  the sock with a hole for its heel, I whisk it

  into the wastebasket. He is tired, allergic,

  his hands full of Ninja Death leaflets,

  I take a sock from the bag, heft his

  Achilles tendon in my palm and pull the

  cotton over the arch and instep,

  I have not done this for years, I feel

  intensely happy, drawing the sock

  up the calf—Other foot—

  as if we are back in the days of my great

  usefulness. We cast the dice

  for how we will fight, I swing my mace,

  he ducks, parries with his chain, I’m dazed, then

  stunned. Day after day, year after

  year I dressed our little beloveds

  as if it were a life’s work,

  stretching the necks of the shirts to get them

  over their heads, guarding the nape as I

  swooped them on their back to slide overalls on—

  back through the toddler clothes to the one-year

  clothes to those gauzy infant-suits that un-

  snapped along each seam to lie

  fully open, like the body first offered to the

  soul to clothe it, the mother given to the child.

  High School Senior

  SHARON OLDS

  For seventeen years, her breath in the house

  at night, puff, puff, like summer

  cumulus above her bed,

  and her scalp smelling of apricots

  —this being who had formed within me,

  squatted like a bright tree-frog in the dark,

  like an eohippus she had come out of history

  slowly, through me, into the daylight,

  I had the daily sight of her,

  like food or air she was there, like a mother.

  I say “college,” but I feel as if I cannot tell

  the difference between her leaving for college

  and our parting forever—I try to see

  this house without her, without her pure

  depth of feeling, without her creek-brown

  hair, her daedal hands with their tapered

  fingers, her pupils dark as the mourning cloak’s

  wing, but I can’t. Seventeen years

  ago, in this room, she moved inside me,

  I looked at the river, I could not imagine

  my life with her. I gazed across the street,

  and saw, in the icy winter sun,<
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  a column of steam rush up away from the earth.

  There are creatures whose children float away

  at birth, and those who throat-feed their young

  for weeks and never see them again. My daughter

  is free and she is in me—no, my love

  of her is in me, moving in my heart,

  changing chambers, like something poured

  from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed.

  Nobody Knows But Mother

  MARY MORRISON

  How many buttons are missing today?

  Nobody knows but Mother.

  How many playthings are strewn in her way?

  Nobody knows but Mother.

  How many thimbles and spools has she missed?

  How many burns on each fat little fist?

  How many bumps to be cuddled and kissed?

  Nobody knows but Mother.

  How many hats has she hunted today?

  Nobody knows but Mother.

  Carelessly hiding themselves in the hay—

  Nobody knows but Mother.

  How many handkerchiefs wilfully strayed?

  How many ribbons for each little maid?

  How for her care can a mother be paid?

  Nobody knows but Mother.

  How many muddy shoes all in a row?

  Nobody knows but Mother.

  How many stockings to darn, do you know?

  Nobody knows but Mother.

  How many little torn aprons to mend?

  How many hours of toil must she spend?

  What is the time when her day’s work shall end?

  Nobody knows but Mother.

  How many lunches for Tommy and Sam?

  Nobody knows but Mother.

  Cookies and apples and blackberry jam—

  Nobody knows but Mother.

  Nourishing dainties for every “sweet tooth,”

  Toddling Dottie or dignified Ruth—

  How much love sweetens the labor, forsooth?

  Nobody knows but Mother.

  How many cares does a mother’s heart know?

  Nobody knows but Mother.

  How many joys from her mother love flow?

  Nobody knows but Mother.

  How many prayers for each little white bed?

  How many tears for her babes has she shed?

  How many kisses for each curly head?

  Nobody knows but Mother.

  From “Clearances,” In Memoriam M.K.H. (1911–1984)

  SEAMUS HEANEY

  When all the others were away at Mass

  I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.

  They broke the silence, let fall one by one

  Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:

  Cold comforts set between us, things to share

  Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.

  And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes

  From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

  So while the parish priest at her bedside

  Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

  And some were responding and some crying

  I remembered her head bent towards my head,

  Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—

  Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

  if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have

  E. E. CUMMINGS

  if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have

  one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor

  a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but

  it will be a heaven of blackred roses

  my father will be (deep like a rose

  tall like a rose)

  standing near my

  (swaying over her

  silent)

  with eyes which are really petals and see

  nothing with the face of a poet really which

  is a flower and not a face with

  hands

  which whisper

  This is my beloved my

  (suddenly in sunlight

  he will bow,

  & the whole garden will bow)

  Somebody’s Mother

  MARY DOW BRINE

  The woman was old and ragged and gray

  And bent with the chill of the Winter’s day.

  The street was wet with a recent snow

  And the woman’s feet were aged and slow.

  She stood at the crossing and waited long,

  Alone, uncared for, amid the throng

  Of human beings who passed her by

  Nor heeded the glance of her anxious eye.

  Down the street, with laughter and shout,

  Glad in the freedom of “school let out,”

  Came the boys like a flock of sheep,

  Hailing the snow piled white and deep.

  Past the woman so old and gray

  Hastened the children on their way.

  Nor offered a helping hand to her—

  So meek, so timid, afraid to stir

  Lest the carriage wheels or the horses’ feet

  Should crowd her down in the slippery street.

  At last came one of the merry troop,

  The gayest laddie of all the group;

  He paused beside her and whispered low,

  “I’ll help you cross, if you wish to go.”

  Her aged hand on his strong young arm

  She placed, and so, without hurt or harm,

  He guided the trembling feet along,

  Proud that his own were firm and strong.

  Then back again to his friends he went,

  His young heart happy and well content.

  “She’s somebody’s mother, boys, you know,

  For all she’s aged and poor and slow,

  “And I hope some fellow will lend a hand

  To help my mother, you understand,

  “If ever she’s poor and old and gray,

  When her own dear boy is far away.”

  And “somebody’s mother” bowed low her head

  In her home that night, and the prayer she said

  Was, “God be kind to the noble boy,

  Who is somebody’s son, and pride and joy!”

  The Book of Ruth 1:16–17

  And Ruth said,

  Intreat me not to leave thee,

  or to return from following after thee:

  For whither thou goest,

  I will go;

  and where thou lodgest,

  I will lodge.

  Thy people shall be my people,

  and thy God my God.

  Where thou diest, will I die,

  and there will I be buried.

  The Lord do so to me, and more also,

  if aught but death part thee and me.

  The Dream That I Told My Mother-in-Law

  ELIZABETH ALEXANDER

  In the room almost filled with our bed,

  the small bedroom, the king-sized bed high up

  and on casters so sometimes we would roll,

  in the room in the corner of the corner

  apartment on top of a hill so the bed would roll,

  we felt as if we might break off and drift,

  float, and become our own continent.

  When your mother first entered our apartment

  she went straight to that room and libated our bed

  with water from your homeland. Soon she saw

  in my cheeks the fire and poppy stain,

  and soon thereafter on that bed came the boy.

  Then months, then the morning I cracked first one

  then two then three eggs in a white bowl

  and all had double yolks, and your mother

  (now our mother) read the signs. Signs everywhere,

  signs rampant, a season of signs and a vial

  of white dirt brought across three continents

  to the enormous white bed that rolled

  and now held three, and
soon held four,

  four on the bed, two boys, one man, and me,

  our mother reading all signs and blessing our bed,

  blessing our bed filled with babies, blessing our bed

  through her frailty, blessing us and our bed,

  blessing us and our bed.

  She began to dream

  of childhood flowers, her long-gone parents.

  I told her my dream in a waiting room:

  a photographer photographed women,

  said her portraits revealed their truest selves.

  She snapped my picture, peeled back the paper,

  and there was my son’s face, my first son, my self.

  Mamma loved that dream so I told it again.

  And soon she crossed over to her parents,

  sisters, one son (War took that son.

  We destroy one another), and women came

  by twos and tens wrapped in her same fine white

  bearing huge pans of stew, round breads, homemade wines,

  and men came in suits with their ravaged faces

  and together they cried and cried and cried

  and keened and cried and the sound

  was a live hive swelling and growing,

  all the water in the world, all the salt, all the wails,

  and the sound grew too big for the building and finally

  lifted what needed to be lifted from the casket and we quieted

  and watched it waft up and away like feather, like ash.

  Daughter, she said, when her journey began, You are a mother now,

  and you have to take care of the world.

  Mother’s Closet

  MAXINE SCATES

  This is everything she ever closed a door

  on, the broom closet of childhood

  where no one could ever find a broom.

  Here, layer upon layer, nothing breathes:

  photo albums curl at the edges, books

  she brought home from the library

  where she worked, handled by thousands

  of other hands before their final exile