Maya Angelou said, "to describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power." Motherhood is power and motherhood is beginnings. Power because mothers grow a life into being and beginnings because that was the site our creation, our first breath began there, with a mother. This Mother’s Day, we’d love to share five poems to reflect today on our complex relationships to the many facets of motherhood.
1. For New Mothers
New Motherhood can look like a growing belly. It can look like discomfort, reevaluating. It looks like the Great Unknown and Infinite Possibility all at once. This Rachel Richardson poem encapsulates the prologue of it all.
Ultrasound
Novel unbegun,
half-loaf rising,
lighthouse northward
and anchor south.
Lemon to grapefruit,
you sleep-step sidewise,
turnover, pop-up,
tongue in the mouth.
2. For Complicated Maternal Relationships
When I think poetry & mothers, I think first of Ocean Vuong. All his works are heavily inspired by his relationship with his mother, but his last poetry collection titled, Time is a Mother, is a must-read on this topic.
From Headfirst, by Ocean Vuong.
“Don’t you know? A mother’s love
neglects pride
the way fire
neglects the cries
of what it burns. My son,
even tomorrow
you will have today. Don’t you know?”
3. For Mothers that are Gone
Sharon Olds is known for her many collections of family poems. I’ll never forget the intensity of reading her ninth collection ‘One Secret Thing’ which explored her breathtakingly fraught relationship with her Mother & the difficulty this created in moving through grief as she grew sick and after she passed.
Here’s an excerpt from a beautiful one titled, Her Birthday As Ashes in Seawater:
By now, my mother has been pulled to the top
of many small waves, carried in the curve that curls
over, onto itself, and unknots,
again, into the liquid plain,
as her ions had first been gathered from appearances
and concepts. And her dividend,
her irreducible, like violet
down, thrown to the seals, starfish,
wolf spiders on the edge-of-Pacific
floor, I like to follow her
from matter into matter, my little quester,
as if she went to sea in a pea-green
boat. Every separate bit,
every crystal shard, seems to
be here — her nature unknowable, dense,
dispersed, her atomization a miracle,
the earth without her a miracle
as if I had arrived on my own.
4. For Metaphorical Births
All too often, conversations around fertility, birth and motherhood are rife with pressure, insensitivity & patriarchal ideals.
Dorothea Lasky’s The Birth addresses this as only she could, with sharp humor and satire:
The birth isn’t about poetry
It is about screaming pain on a Sunday
Hailing a cab and head racing
To the hospital, now so close to the new apartment
I had a baby inside of me
But no one expected it to happen so fast
Or then at least they said they didn’t
Maybe they expected it to happen so fast
All along
Alone in the waiting room I shook and shook
And the blood ran down my legs
Later with the magnesium
I thought of the many permutations of the bald head
Pale, pickling fish skin, glowing with scales
5. For the Hope Mothering Brings
Whatever your proximity to the act of birthing and raising, to witness it is to witness an act of hope and faith. Motherhood is hope-bringing, it’s faith-expanding. This is what makes it terrifying and important - these are influential seeds of metaphysics. The poem Good Bones, by Maggie Smith, never fails to amaze me with how it captures the nuance of this:
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
Written by F.M Papaz
Writer Bio:
F.M Papaz is a Greek-Australian poet, editor and teacher who believes that there is space at the literary table for everyone and is excitedly setting up your cutlery. Her poems have appeared in Wild Roof Journal, Five South and Mantissa Poetry Review. She is the Managing Editor of Milk Press and a 2024-2025 Barbara Germack Foundry Fellow. Connect @fmpapaz on socials or fmpapaz.com/ings to find her monthly newsletter about living a creative life.