Thursday's Poems

After School on Ordinary Days

After school on ordinary days we listened
to The Shadow and The Lone Ranger
as we gathered around the tabletop radio
that was always kept on the china cabinet
built into the wall in that tenement kitchen,
a china cabinet that held no china, except
thick and white and utilitarian,
cups and saucers, poor people's cups
from the 5 & 10 cent store.
My mother was always home
from Ferraro's Coat factory
by the time we walked in the door
after school on ordinary days,
and she'd give us milk with Bosco in it
and cookies she'd made that weekend.
The three of us would crowd around the radio,
listening to the voices that brought a wider world
into our Paterson apartment. Later
we'd have supper at the kitchen table,
the house loud with our arguments
and laughter. After supper on ordinary
days, our homework finished, we'd play
monopoly or gin rummy, the kitchen
warmed by the huge coal stove, the wind
outside rattling the loose old windows,
we inside, tucked in, warm and together,
on ordinary days that we didn't know
until we looked back across a distance
of forty years would glow and shimmer
in memory's flickering light.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan

......

The only thing that helps me get over not holding a newborn of my own 
is the hope to hold one again as Grandma someday.

Day Bath

Last night I walked him back and forth,

his small head heavy against my chest,

round eyes watching me in the dark,

his body a sandbag in my arms.

I longed for sleep but couldn't bear his     crying

so bore him back and forth until the sun rose

and he slept. Now the doors are open,

noon sunlight coming in,

and I can see fuchsias opening.

Now we bathe. I hold him, the soap

makes our skins glide past each other.

I lay him wet on my legs, his head on my knees,

his feet dancing against my chest,

and I rinse him, pouring water

from my cupped hand.

No matter how I feel, he's the same,

eyes expectant, mouth ready,

with his fat legs and arms,

his belly, his small solid back.

Last night I wanted nothing more 

than to get him out of my arms.

Today he fits neatly

along the hollow my thighs make,

and with his fragrant skin against mine

I feel brash, like a sunflower.

Debra Spencer, for my son

 ......

A Poem for Emily

Small fact and fingers and farthest one from me,
a hand's width and two generations away,
in this still present I am fifty-three.
You are not yet a full day.

When I am sixty-three, when you are ten,
and you are neither closer nor as far,
your arms will fill with what you know by then,
the arithmetic and love we do and are.

When I by blood and luck am eighty-six
and you are someplace else and thirty-three
believing in sex and god and politics
with children who look not at all like me,

sometime I know you will have read them this
so they will know I love them and say so
and love their mother. Child, whatever is
is always or never was. Long ago,

a day I watched awhile beside your bed,
I wrote this down, a thing that might be kept
awhile, to tell you what I would have said
when you were who knows what and I was dead
which is I stood and loved you while you slept.

 Miller Williams