This time around all poems will be about family.
Upon realizing all my picks for this theme were rather dark, I have decided to begin with Daddy’s Song by Suheir Hammad. Hammad was born in Jordan to Palestinian parents, was raised in Brooklyn, featured extensively on Def Poetry and has published a few books. I believe a recording of this poem can also be found on her Zaatar Diva cd.
Richard Shelton with Brother. He’s Regents Professor emeritus (English) at the University of Arizona. This poem can be found in his book Of All the Dirty Words.
you still carry
your guilt around for company
I will not deprive you of it
but I have an empty space
where my hate lived
while I nursed it
as if it were a child
brother my only
brother it was too late for us
before we were born
it was too late
before you learned to be brutal
and I learned to be weak
your childhood
was a hallway of doors
each closing just as you
got to it
but I was younger
and all the doors were closed
before I could walk
how could I have expected you
to save me when you could
not save yourself
brother my only
brother if not from you
from whom did I learn
so much despair
I went in search
of a father and found you
with a whip in your hand
but what were you searching for
in such dark places
where I was searching for love
Sylvia Plath with Daddy. This is her voice in this recording. Plath was an American poet– did something to popularize confessional poetry. She is also famous for her marriage to poet Ted Hughes and for committing suicide.
Finally. Gwendolyn Brooks’ the mother. This woman was a seriously talented and prolific American poet. She won many awards including a Pulitzer and was Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968. You can listen to a recording of Brooks reading this and other poems on Poetry Archive.
Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.
I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?–
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.
Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.
