She Walks in Beauty: A Woman's Journey Through Poems (13 page)

ROSEMARY CATACALOS

Habibi, I want to
live
the string bag from Bahrain—a birthday
you say—

with its brazen blue mouth and deep yellow light always rising
from

below. Clearly a woman's work, stitches through which the air
shines,

and the things within are apparent from without. A woman's days

laced together, only closed enough to contain her faith. A woman's

fishing net, her dream, which, if slept upon, would mark the skin

with equal-armed crosses that say the center is everywhere.
As grape

leaves the world over are seasoned with the same sun. As no child

anywhere should ever want to die. A woman's prayer, with
handles

top
and
bottom so always the load can be slung between two

walkers on the same path.

ROBERT HERRICK

A sweet disorder in the dress

Kindles in clothes a wantonness:

A lawn about the shoulders thrown

Into a fine distraction:

An erring lace, which here and there

Enthrals the crimson stomacher:

A cuff neglectful, and thereby

Ribbons to flow confusedly:

A winning wave, deserving note,

In the tempestuous petticoat:

A careless shoe-string, in whose tie

I see a wild civility:

Do more bewitch me than when art

Is too precise in every part.

On Being Asked, Whence Is the Flower?

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,

I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,

Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,

To please the desert and the sluggish brook.

The purple petals, fallen in the pool,

Made the black water with their beauty gay;

Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,

And court the flower that cheapens his array.

Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why

This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,

Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,

Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:

Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!

I never thought to ask, I never knew:

But, in my simple ignorance, suppose

The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.

MARIANNE MOORE

You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability rather than

an asset—that in view of the fact that spirit creates form we are

    justified in supposing

    that you must have brains. For you, a symbol of the unit, stiff

        and sharp,

conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority and liking

    for everything

self-dependent, anything an

ambitious civilization might produce: for you, unaided, to attempt

    through sheer

reserve to confute presumptions resulting from observation is

    idle. You cannot make us

    think you a delightful happen-so. But rose, if you are brilliant,

    it

is not because your petals are the without-which-nothing of pre-

    eminence. You would look, minus

thorns—like a what-is-this, a mere

peculiarity. They are not proof against a storm, the elements, or

    mildew

but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliance without

    coordination? Guarding the

    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.

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.

M
Y 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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.