Poems for Mothers' Day
One of the most intense and rewarding projects I have ever worked on was Night Feeds and Morning Songs, a collection of poems about motherhood. This was not only because of the emotive subject matter, but also because, immediately after Mother’s Day 2020 and shortly before I began editing the anthology, the nation locked down. We retreated into our houses and for many of us – although we didn’t know it at the time – the longest period of separation from our mums we would ever know was beginning.
It was far from an easy year to be a parent, enduring the sticky chaos of home-schooling or the isolation of the newborn days without a support network, but it was an agonising time to be a grown-up child, too, wracked with fears for our parents. (And, in lighter but occasionally genuinely fraught moments, trying to help them navigate Zoom.)
I edited Night Feeds and Morning Songs, a collection of poems about motherhood, while locked down with my young children and unable to see my own mother. I have to admit that I cried a lot. (Also: shouting, wine, half-hearted attempts at Joe Wicks workouts, wearing the same tracksuit bottoms for weeks, despairing of going to the loo alone ever again, forgetting what a hairbrush was, more crying.) These poems took me from pregnancy to the empty nest and to every mad milestone between, and it felt a particularly poignant time on every level to be thinking about this wild, deep bond, and about how it evolves over the years.
Now the paperback is about to be published, and — thank goodness — life feels back on an even keel. We can say in person how grateful we are for each other. I am a better mother by far for not being so crushed up against full-time motherhood. Being teacher, family and friend to my daughters (not to mention chef, housemaid, cheerleader, encyclopaedia, referee…) was an impossible task. But this collection is a beautiful thing that came out of a difficult time, and the poems still move me so much. Here are a handful of my favourites.
Great-grandmother, by Jean Valentine
Great-grandmother,
be with us
as if in the one same day & night
we all gave birth
in the one same safe-house, warm,
and then we rest together,
sleep, and nurse,
dreamily talk to our babies, warm,
in a safe room all of us
carried in the close black sky.
I love the peace within this poem, and the sense that as mothers we are part of a long line of women who walked this way before us, feeding, soothing and loving.
The Evening Star by Sappho
Hesperus, you bring everything that
the light-tinged dawn has scattered;
you bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring
the child back to its mother.
Sappho’s poems survive only in scraps and tatters but those fragments are enough to show us why she was so feted in the ancient world that Plato called her ‘the Tenth Muse’. I find these beautiful lines so deeply soothing, with their nursery rhyme cadences and the idea of rounding up the animals and bringing everyone safely home.
The Temple of the Wood Lavender by Lady Caroline Blanche Elizabeth Lindsay
A perfum’d sprig of lavender
You gave, dear child, to me;
It grew, you said, by the red rose bed,
And under the jessamine tree.
’Twas sweet, ay, sweet from many things;
But (sweeter than all) with scent
Of long past years and laughter and tears
It to me was redolent.
Our mothers are the repository of memories for the years we can no longer recall. We don’t remember learning to clap our chubby hands, or grabbing for the candle on our first birthday cake… but she does. It’s hard for a mother not to mourn her children’s infancy – though we might not miss the sleepless nights, we grieve for the squeezable thighs, the tiny froggy legs and the months when we were asked if we ‘merembered’ something. This short poem beautifully expresses a mother’s nostalgia for that strangely one-sided intimacy, built at first from months and years that only one of you remembers, though they colour everything after it with love.
Limbs by Mary Walker
Afraid of the dark, they find their way
to my bed at night; one hot, one cold
and no rest for any of us.
Sleepless elbows and knees find my hip,
shin, and the tender bone under my eye,
my body remembering a knot of child
kneading my bladder, stealing my breath,
stamping footprints on my belly.
These growing limbs –
needing new shoes, longer pants, another haircut;
these limbs that cling to me like vines to the face of a house –
they are working themselves free.
Against the curtain of their still small breaths,
truth dawns – these limbs will outlast me.
Worse, first
they will stop walking themselves
to my bedside at night.
Personally, I’m a demon if I’m woken. Having weathered the extreme exhaustion of the baby years, I genuinely don’t feel nostalgic for the months I slept only for the odd hour, dropping like a stone out of consciousness until the next howl. Despite that, this lovely poem ambushed me completely when I discovered it – especially the beautifully paced power of this line: “they are working themselves free.”
Mother and Daughter Sonnets XVI by Augusta Webster
She will not have it that my days wanes low,
Poor of the fire its drooping sun denies,
That on my brow the thin lines write good-byes
Which soon may be read plain for all the know,
Telling that I have done with youth’s brave show;
Alas! and done with youth in heart and eyes,
With wonder and far expectancies,
Save but to say ‘I knew such long ago.’
She will not have it. Loverlike to me,
She with her happy gaze finds all that’s best,
She sees this fair and that unfretted still,
And her own sunshine over all the rest:
So she half keeps me as she’d have me be,
And I forget to age, through her sweet will.
Victorian poet Augusta Webster expresses so gorgeously here that your mum is always your mum, no matter how many years pass, what they bring or how many miles are between you. I hope the last Mothers’ Day we’ll be apart is behind us.
Night Feeds and Morning Songs, edited by Ana Sampson, is published by Trapeze.
