Poems for Mother's Day

Many writers have explored their relationships with their mothers, sometimes with words of ecstatic love and devotion, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem "To My Mother":

     The angels, whispering to one another,
     Can find, among their burning terms of love,
     None so devotional as that of “Mother”

Poets have often celebrated the complex relationship between mother and child. In “For My Mother," for example, May Sarton writes:

     I summon you now
     Not to think of
     The ceaseless battle
     With pain and ill health,
     The frailty and the anguish.
     No, today I remember
     The creator,
     The lion-hearted.

Sylvia Plath wrote searing poems about a strained mother-child relationship, including “Medusa," which addresses the mother who calls often on the telephone:

     In any case, you are always there,
     Tremulous breath at the end of my line,
     Curve of water upleaping
     To my water rod, dazzling and grateful,
     Touching and sucking.

In Seamus Heaney’s sequence “Clearances," written in memory of his mother, he includes a sonnet about the lovely mundane moments that happened while he and his mother peeled potatoes in the kitchen, the rest of the family away at church:

     So while the parish priest at her bedside
     Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

     And some were responding and some crying
     I remembered her head bent towards my head,
     Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—
     Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

Poetic Greetings, Essays & More for Mothers

By Hand: Lines for Mother’s Day
Find the right words to say to your mother for Mother’s Day with this selection of meaningful lines you can share in your own personalized, poetic greeting.

Going for Motherlode: On Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born
In this essay, Miranda Field takes a look at Adrienne Rich’s important feminist text Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, in which Rich discusses what Field calls the “chasm separating women’s actual (or at least potential) link to maternity, and the ‘theories, ideals, archetypes, descriptions’ patriarchal culture substitutes for this real relationship."

Mother Knows Best
The poets in this collection—Toi Derricotte, Juan Felipe Herrera, Jim Moore, Valzhyna Mort, Sharon Olds, and Sandra Simonds—present poems about their mothers and discuss their mothers’ responses to the poems written about them.

On Human Cylinders: The Pregnant Poet
In this essay, Danielle Pafunda discusses the ways writers have traditionally approached poetry of pregnancy and the female body, and examines how poets like Maxine Chernoff, Toi Derricotte, Susan Howe, Alice Notley, Anne Sexton, and more approach the subject.

Relative Strangers: Remembering My Grandmother Ruth Stone
Poet and essayist Hillery Stone, the granddaughter of poet Ruth Stone, discusses her memories of, and relationship with, her grandmother and the last moments of the celebrated poet’s life.

Further Reading for Mother's Day & Beyond

Not for Mothers Only: Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing, edited by Catherine Wagner and Rebecca Wolff
The anthology includes nearly eighty poets writing on topics such as adoption, parenting guide books, and single parenthood, in poems that address the politics, difficulties, and satisfactions of mothering.


MotherSongs: Poems for, by, and about Mothers, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Diana O'Hehir
This anthology includes poems about pregnancies, birthing and nursing, living with children, mothers grieving their children, aging mothers, grandmothers, and mothers who’ve passed, among other themes.


Motherhood: Poems about Mothers
Part of the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series, Motherhood: Poems about Mothers includes poems that capture the particulars of motherhood from various perspectives and angles.
 

Mother Love by Rita Dove
In this collection, Dove takes the classic mother-daughter tale of Demeter and Persephone out of the realm of Greek myth and places them in settings as various as Arizona, Mexico, and a bistro in Paris.



Tender Hooks by Beth Ann Fennelly
In Tender Hooks, Fennelly includes poems that track the joys, trials, and complexities of new motherhood.



Magdalene by Marie Howe
In this collection, Howe's fourth book of poems, the central events are the revelation of love after adopting a daughter later in life and a teacher’s deep presence (though thronged with other disciples).
 

Milk by Dorothea Lasky
The poems in Dorothea Lasky’s fifth poetry collection, Milk, tackle a range of dark subject matter, but these are not typical poetic narratives of loss.



The End of Pink by Kathryn Neurnberger
Nuernberger’s second book is a visit to the end of innocence and an entry into the war-zone years of getting pregnant, giving birth, and early motherhood.



Our Andromeda by Brenda Shaughnessy
Brenda Shaughnessy’s third collection taps into both the personal and universal as it explores themes of astronomy, illness, the family, motherhood, and home.



Blackacre by Monica Youn
The book is a vivid rendering of waiting in a white room for a door to open up into the battlefield of motherhood.