Poetry recs wanted
September 3, 2013 5:18 PM   Subscribe

Recommend me poems about children and parenthood that have the opposite sentiment of Philip Larkin's This Be The Verse.

Question inspired by this recent thread here. Generally, I'm looking for poems that have a more optimistic view of the idea of having and rearing a child. Oh and they must be good poems too, not Hallmark tripe.
posted by Wonton Cruelty to Writing & Language (11 answers total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
Morning Song, Sylvia Plath.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

posted by sweetkid at 5:29 PM on September 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


The Baby That Ate Cincinnati by Matt Mason
posted by roll truck roll at 5:30 PM on September 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


Gary Snyder - Axe Handles has a sentiment that is the opposite of "your parents' parent screwed up your parents"
posted by one_bean at 5:38 PM on September 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


To a Sad Daughter by Michael Ondaatje.
posted by backwards guitar at 5:39 PM on September 3, 2013 [4 favorites]


This perhaps tangentially meets your needs.

Galway Kinnell: "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps."
posted by baseballpajamas at 6:25 PM on September 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


"A Little Tooth"

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly off the bone. It's all


over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,


your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.


---Thomas Lux
posted by scratch at 6:26 PM on September 3, 2013 [5 favorites]


Li-Young Lee, "The Gift."
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:30 PM on September 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


Anna Laetitia Barbauld, "To a Little Invisible Being Who is Expected Soon to Become Visible."
posted by thomas j wise at 7:38 PM on September 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueback cold
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden

The Goodnight

He stood still by her bed
Watching his daughter breathe,
The dark and silver head,
The fingers curled beneath,
And thought:
Though she may have
Intelligence and charm
And luck, they will not save
Her life from every harm.

The lives of children are
Dangerous to their parents
With fire, water, air,
And other accidents;
And some, for a child's sake,
Anticipating doom,
Empty the world to make
The world safe as a room.

Who could endure the pain
That was Laocoon's?
Twisting, he saw again
In the same coil, his sons.
Plumed in his Father's skill,
Young Icarus flew higher
Toward the sun, until
He fell in rings of fire.

A man who cannot stand
Children's perilous play,
With lifted voice and hand
Drives the children away.
Out of sight, out of reach,
The tumbling children pass;
He sits on an empty beach,
Holding an empty glass.

Who said that tenderness
Will turn the heart to stone?
May I endure her weakness
As I endure my own.
Better to say goodnight
To breathing flesh and blood
Each night as though the night
We're always only good.

Louis Simpson

I'd also recommend Mark Strand's The Continuous Life and e.e. cummings' lovely my father moved through dooms of love, which is so loving and reverent of his father that it is the complete opposite end of the spectrum from Larkin's This Be the Verse -- here's just the end part but you should read the whole thing:

Though dull were all we taste as bright
Bitter all utterly things sweet
Maggoty minus and dumb death
All we inherent, all bequeath

And nothing quite so least as truth
--I say though hate were why men breathe--
Because my father lived his soul
Love is the whole, and more than all.

(I have probably messed up the capitalization and punctuation there a bit, sorry.) Anyway, good luck!
posted by onlyconnect at 12:08 AM on September 4, 2013 [1 favorite]


"A Barred Owl"
Richard Wilbur
The warping night air having brought the boom
Of an owl’s voice into her darkened room,
We tell the wakened child that all she heard
Was an odd question from a forest bird,
Asking of us, if rightly listened to,
“Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?”

Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,
Can also thus domesticate a fear,
And send a small child back to sleep at night
Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight
Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw
Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.
posted by tmharris65 at 2:23 AM on September 4, 2013


Love You Forever is a heartbreaking prose poem about parenthood and child rearing in the form of a picture book.
posted by jbickers at 6:30 AM on September 4, 2013


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