Another Poem on My Daughter’s Birthday

Craig Morgan Teicher

There must be soft words
for an evening like this, when the breeze
caresses like gentle fingertips
all over. I don’t know

how not to write darkly and sad.
But it’s two years today since
my little girl was born, cut safely
from the noose.

We meant nothing but hope;
how near death is to that.

Only children, only some children,
get to run free from these snags. She
was born! She lived and she grows
like joy spreading from the syllables

of songs. She reminds me of now
and now and now.
I must learn
to have been so lucky.

Copyright @ 2014 by Craig Morgan Teicher. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on May 22, 2014.

Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of The Trembling Answers (BOA Editions, 2017), winner of the 2018 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

About Craig Morgan Teicher

Themes

Daughters

About this Poem

“It’s hard to write happy poems, I think. I’ve only partially succeeded—this poem came about as a result of a self-assignment to celebrate something. I celebrate things all the time in my lived life, but I think TV, not poetry, is where we go to feel happy. But I wanted to try to make a happy poem, and there’s no one who makes me happier than my daughter, so I wrote about her. The poem came out more as a wish for happiness than as happiness itself, but that’s poetry for you.”

—Craig Morgan Teicher

Sign up for Poem-a-Day

Lifted

Well, I guess no one can have everything.
I must learn to celebrate when I fail.
Inner growth and fortitude follow the sting,
right? Won't I rise with holy wind in my sails?
Yet they always seem to get what I want,
door after door flung open. Why are
the keepers of doors, who haunt
the hopeful halls of fate and desire
so partial to them, but not to me?
Yes, I do feel sorry for myself—don't, brother,
pretend the bitter blanket of self-pity,
hasn't warmed your bones.

Craig Morgan Teicher

2019

Another Day

It should be difficult,
always difficult, rising
from bed each morning,
against gravity, against

dreams, which weigh
like the forgotten names
of remembered faces.
But some days it’s

easy, nothing, to rise,
to feed, to work, to
commit the small graces
that add up to love,

to family, to memory,
finally to life, or
what one would choose
to remember of it, not

those other leaden
mornings when sleep
is so far preferable
to pulling over one’s

Craig Morgan Teicher

2018

Poems

Another Poem on My Daughter’s Birthday

More by this poet

Lifted

Tomorrow and Tomorrow Again

Another Day

Poems

Page submenu block

Another Poem on My Daughter’s Birthday

More by this poet

Lifted

Tomorrow and Tomorrow Again

Another Day

Newsletter Sign Up