In honor of Mother’s Day, poet Richard Blanco joined Boston Public Radio for another edition of The Village Voice — making sense of the world through poetry.
Through these poems, Blanco said he hopes to reveal “the complex emotional lives of mothers, who are first women and human beings.”
According to Blanco, Mother's Day should be about more than just rushing into a CVS to buy a Hallmark card — the day should be about thinking holistically about mothers.
"I think that's what all these poems have in common, they sort of reveal the multiple dimensions of, first of all, just being a human being, and then being a woman, and then being a mother — I think sometimes we can forget that," Blanco said. "That's what I love about all these poems, and every poem that you find (besides a Hallmark poem) about a mother."
DayStar
Rita Dove
She wanted a little room for thinking:
but she saw diapers steaming
on the line,
A doll slumped behind the door.
So she lugged a chair behind
the garage to sit out the
children's naps
Sometimes there were things to watch--
the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,
a floating maple leaf.
Other days she stared until she
was assured when she closed
her eyes she'd only see her own
vivid blood.
She had an hour, at best,
before Liza appeared pouting from
the top of the stairs.
And just what was mother doing
out back with the field mice?
Why, building a palace.
Later that night when Thomas
rolled over and lurched into her,
She would open her eyes
and think of the place that was hers
for an hour--where she was nothing,
pure nothing, in the middle of the day
Venus in Miami Beach
Richard Blanco
What calls her to the sea? She rises, steps
toward the shore with the temperament
of a bride, her shadow a long train pulled
across the sand behind her, parting a flock
of seagulls screeching away into the wind.
Her swollen ankles and frail shoulders
disappear inch by inch under her body
as she wades into the water, becoming
as young as I remember her in a photo
posing like a mermaid for my father.
Once, as gorgeous as her name—Geysa—
once a girl chasing fireflies who hadn’t lost
her home and country, sisters and husband,
once a mother who watched me as I watch
her now, afraid of her alone with the sea.
I wave to her, but she turns away from me,
fixes her eyes on the horizon and beyond
at nothing I can see, needing no one
it seems, like Venus’s gaze I’m tempted
to think, born full-grown out of the sea.
But today, she’s not a goddess or a girl,
not my mother, but simply a her, floating
in the circle of her own arms, a water lily,
tranquil and sure of her being, being.
Another Poem for Mothers
Erin Belieu
Mother, I’m trying
to write
a poem to you—
which is how most
poems to mothers must
begin—or, What I’ve wanted
to say, Mother...but we
as children of mothers,
even when mothers ourselves,
cannot bear our poems
to them. Poems to
mothers make us feel
little again. How to describe
that world that mothers spin
and consume and trap
and love us in, that spreads
for years and men and miles?
Those particular hands that could
smooth anything: butter on bread,
cool sheets or weather. It’s
the wonder of them, good or bad,
those mother-hands that pet
and shape and slap,
that sew you together
the pieces of a better house
or life in which you’ll try
to live. Mother,
I’ve done no better
than the others, but for now,
here is your clever failure.
