Motherhood Poems About Mothers

Celebrating mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, grandmothers and grandchildren,Motherhoodis a glorious, wonderfully intimate tribute to the first love in every reader's life. From tenth-century Japan's Izumi Shikibu, colonial America's Anne Bradstreet, and Victorian England's Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Israel's Yehuda Amichai, Ireland's Paul Muldoon, and Russia's Anna Akhmatova, poets across the centuries and around the world have immortalized this elemental relationship. Among the more than seventy poets in this anthology, Audre Lorde recalls "How the days went / While you were blooming within me"; Jorie Graham muses on her mother's sewing box; Allen Ginsberg says goodbye in "Kaddish"; and Langston Hughes invokes a mother's empowering example: "Don't you fall now / For I'se still goin', honey, / I'se still climbin', / And life for me ain't been no crystal stair." From Emily Bronte's "Upon Her Soothing Breast" and Seamus Heaney's "Mother of the Groom" to Sylvia Plath's "Morning Song" and Frank O'Hara's "Ave Maria," the more than one hundred poems collected here enshrine the miracle of motherhood and the richness of feeling and experience it inspires.

Carmela Ciuraru is the editor of the anthology First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems That Captivated and Inspired Them, and the former editor of the Journal of the Poetry Society of America. A graduate of Columbia University's School of Journalism, she lives in New York City.

To a little invisible being who is expected soon to become visible	p. 19
Infant sorrow	p. 21
"The angel that presided o'er my birth"	p. 21
Before the birth of one of her children	p. 22
"Upon her soothing breast"	p. 24
Freight	p. 25
You're	p. 26
Morning song	p. 27
Child	p. 28
An impromptu for Ann Jennings	p. 29
Now that I am forever with child	p. 31
The new-born baby's song	p. 32
Ultrasound	p. 33
Night light	p. 39
Prayer before birth	p. 40
Childbirth	p. 42
The pomegranate	p. 45
A fable	p. 47
A mother's picture	p. 49
To my mother	p. 50
Mother and daughter	p. 52
My mother's kiss	p. 53
News for her mother	p. 55
Something	p. 57
First Thanksgiving	p. 58
Black mother woman	p. 59
All Hallows Eve	p. 60
Little girl, my string bean, my lovely woman	p. 62
The blossom	p. 67
What shall I give my children?	p. 69
After 37 years my mother apologizes for my childhood	p. 70
Upon being awakened at night by my four year old daughter	p. 71
Momma sayings	p. 72
Glen Cove, 1957	p. 75
Drawing from the past	p. 76
Mother's sewing box	p. 77
The only child sends a gift to her mother	p. 79
The fortress	p. 80
Genetic expedition	p. 83
The month of June: 13 1/2	p. 85
The queen and the young princess	p. 86
Human affection	p. 87
On my son's return out of England, July 17, 1661	p. 91
To my mother	p. 93
The little black boy	p. 94
From Poems to a son	p. 96
Shards	p. 98
On a son returned to New Zealand	p. 100
Mother and child	p. 101
Illuminations	p. 102
Mother to son	p. 104
Pre-text	p. 105
Mother, summer, I	p. 107
Chiffon morning	p. 108
Crow and mama	p. 112
My mother's pears	p. 114
Ave Maria	p. 116
The horse show	p. 118
Mother's things	p. 120
Nick and the candlestick	p. 121
My son the man	p. 123
Mother of the groom	p. 124
Brown circle	p. 125
My mother's hands	p. 127
Picnic	p. 129
My mother in old age	p. 130
Sitting at night on the front porch	p. 131
My first love, my mother	p. 135
To my mother	p. 136
Mother's song	p. 137
Mother	p. 138
My mother once told me	p. 139
The intruder	p. 140
Mother	p. 142
Ma	p. 143
On walking backwards	p. 144
Lines	p. 145
Handbag	p. 146
My mother on an evening in late summer	p. 147
The black lace fan my mother gave me	p. 150
What we lost	p. 152
The parcel	p. 154
Anniversary	p. 156
I ask my mother to sing	p. 159
Mothers	p. 160
In an iridescent time	p. 162
My mother	p. 163
Among women	p. 167
Grandmother watching at her window	p. 168
Lineage	p. 169
Legacies	p. 170
Getting ready for the night	p. 171
My grandmother is waiting for me to come home	p. 173
The needle	p. 174
Ironing grandmother's tablecloth	p. 175
Church fair	p. 176
Adages of a grandmother	p. 178
From Grandmothers	p. 181
My grandmother's love letters	p. 183
Sestina	p. 185
After the death of her daughter in childbirth, looking at the child	p. 189
To an absent daughter	p. 191
Maternity	p. 192
On by boy Henry	p. 193
The mother's charge	p. 194
Heirloom	p. 196
The wake	p. 198
Upon the sight of my abortive birth the 31st of December 1657	p. 200
The mother	p. 206
On visiting the grave of my stillborn little girl	p. 208
Dialogue	p. 209
A mother in a refugee camp	p. 211
Love	p. 212
In memory of my mother	p. 214
Childhood house	p. 215
Not dying	p. 217
After the pastoral	p. 219
Song of Amargo's mother	p. 220
My mother's R & R	p. 221
Goodbye	p. 222
From Kaddish	p. 224
Miscarriage	p. 227
"if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have"	p. 229
Clearances	p. 230
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Motherhood Poems About Mothers

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

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