Poem Of The Day
At this month's Glendale Community College reading, I read several poems
from Beth Ann Fennelly's 2008 book, "Unmentionables."
I read "When Did You Know You Wanted To Be A Writer?"
and "Because People Ask What My Daughter Will Think Of My Poems When She's 16"
But I also shared this one, since it was right after Mother's Day:
"I Provide For You, Boy Child, Like God"
and like God, I will cast you out.
Your eyes blue as a drowned thing.
Your harshest lesson:
you are no part of me.
Learning that
will cost you ages in which
your eyes take on the human color: grief.
Coming to words won’t even help you
name your suffering.
You will embrace
false idols.
Yet those women can let you
back in that primal crawl space
no more than I can.
~Beth Ann Fennelly
(originally published in American Poetry Review)