Putting love into words - some poems on parenthood

Ever since we started our Writing Parenthood classes, I've been even more attuned to seeking out excellent writing about parenthood. Becoming a parent is such a transformative experience that it's unsurprising that so many people have written about it's impact on their lives and tried to put into words the immense feelings it inspires.There are so many poems that I love, but here are just a few that really stick in my mind for various reasons. I'd love to hear other recommendations too.

The first one I've chosen is a very simple poem by Adrian Mitchell called Beatrix is Three. I read this long before I had children of my own but it always stayed in my mind because of the beautiful image it paints of a father's love. Now as a parent I really empathise with the sentiment of time speeding on and how you want to press pause on the beautiful moments and preserve that time where they totally trust and love you.

Beatrix is Three

At the top of the stairs 
I ask for her hand. O.K
She gives it to me. 
How her fist fits my palm, 
A bunch of consolation. 
We take our time 
Down the steep carpetway 
As I wish silently 
That the stairs were endless.

The second poem is a very different one by Grace Nichols and again I read it before I had children. Now I appreciate even more the way she evokes the image of the two women supporting each other through motherhood - I know now how good friends can pull you through the hard times, especially those who can help you to laugh.

Waiting for Thelma's Laughter

You wanna take the world

in hand

and fix-it-up

the way you fix your living room



You wanna reach out and crush

life's big and small injustices

in the fire and honey

of your hands



You wanna scream

cause your head's too small

for your dreams



and the children

running round

acting like lil clowns

breaking the furniture down



while I sit through

it all watching you

knowing any time now

your laughter's gonna come



to drown and heal us all 


I'm certain that I will always find comfort in that poem. My next choice is not one poem but a selection of poems by the Irish poet Eavan Boland called Night Feed.  These are beautiful quiet poems that evoke that still time of night when you wake to feed a baby and feel like you are the only two souls alive. I won't quote whole poems as they are long but here is the beginning of Domestic Interior:

This is dawn.

Believe me  

This is your season, little daughter
The moment daisies open,
The hour mercurial rainwater
Makes a mirror for sparrows.
It's time we drowned our sorrows.


I tiptoe in.
I lift you up
Wriggling
In your rosy, zipped sleeper.
Yes, this is the hour 
For the early bird and me
When finder is keeper

I also really like the poet Sharon Olds and the way she reflects motherhood in her poetry. There are so many great examples and I've picked this one because of the very physical sense of love that it evokes:

The Daughter Goes to Camp

In the taxi alone, home from the airport,
I could not believe you were gone. My palm kept
creeping over the smooth plastic
to find your strong meaty little hand and
squeeze it, find your narrow thigh in the
noble ribbing of the corduroy,
straight and regular as anything in nature, to
find the slack cool cheek of a
child in the heat of a summer morning-
nothing, nothing, waves of bawling
hitting me in hot flashes like some
change of life, some boiling wave
rising in me toward your body, toward
where it should have been on the seat, your
brow curved like a cereal bowl, your
eyes dark with massed crystals like the
magnified scales of a butterfly's wing, the
delicate feelers of your limp hair,
floods of blood rising in my face as I
tried to reassemble the hot
gritty molecules in the car, to
make you appear like a holograph
on the back seat, pull you out of nothing
as I once did-but you were really gone,
the cab glossy as a slit caul out of
which you had slipped, the air glittering
electric with escape as it does in the room at a birth.

And finally, a poem from Joanne Limburg that at first glance appears lighter but in fact cuts to the chase of the difficulties of being a parent and the sacrifices we must all make. It's another long one so I won't quote it all but here is the start..

Mother Chicken Soup


God forbid
her family should starve, 
so mother is boiling herself down
for soup,


slicing the carrots
with an upward stroke to the thumb, 
rolling perfect kneidlach,
mixing up the stock.
After so many years
nothing needs to be measured.


Hasn't she been rehearsing this
for years?
Divided herself, leg and breast,
one, two, three ways
to make three children's mothers?
Put aside her book,
her job, her time?
Taken the food off her own plate
A thousand times?

I hope you enjoyed these poems. I'd love to hear recommendations for other good poems about parenthood and hope you also find some of these inspiring for your own writing.