Family

You can't choose your family and the family can't choose you. You have to deal with them. Blood links family members forever. This bond is strong, although there are many family situations which are difficult and causes disruption. The poems I have chosen are mainly focused on the relationship between parents and children, in my opinion the strongest bond there is.

 
1. Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival.  New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety.  We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses.  I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s.  The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars.  And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Sylvia Plath

2. Praise Song for My Mother

You were
water to me
deep and bold and fathoming

You were
moon’s eye to me
pull and grained and mantling

You were
sunrise to me
rise and warm and streaming

You were
the fishes red gill to me
the flame tree’s spread to me
the crab’s leg/the fried plantain smell
replenishing replenishing

Go to your wide futures, you said

Grace Nichols 

3. Father

My father knows the proper way

The nation should be run;

He tells us children every day

Just what should now be done.

He knows the way to fix the trusts,

He has a simple plan;

But if the furnace needs repairs,

We have to hire a man.

My father, in a day or two

Could land big thieves in jail;

There’s nothing that he cannot do,

He knows no word like “fail.”

“Our confidence” he would restore,

Of that there is no doubt;

But if there is a chair to mend,

We have to send it out.

All public questions that arise,

He settles on the spot;

He waits not till the tumult dies,

But grabs it while it’s hot.

In matters of finance he can

Tell Congress what to do;

But, O, he finds it hard to meet

His bills as they fall due.

It almost makes him sick to read

The things law-makers say;

Why, father’s just the man they need,

He never goes astray.

All wars he’d very quickly end,

As fast as I can write it;

But when a neighbor starts a fuss,

’Tis mother has to fight it.

In conversation father can

Do many wondrous things;

He’s built upon a wiser plan

Than presidents or kings.

He knows the ins and outs of each

And every deep transaction;

We look to him for theories,

But look to ma for action.

Edgar Guest

4. A Prayer for my Daughter

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on.  There is no obstacle
But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,
While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless could have her way
Yet chose a bandy-leggèd smith for man.
It’s certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty’s very self, has charm made wise,
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

W.B. Yeats


5. Family Album

I like old photographs of relatives   

in black and white, their faces set like stone.   

They knew this was serious business.   

My favorite album is the one that's filled   

with people none of us can even name.   

I find the recent ones more difficult.   

I wonder, now, if anyone remembers   

how fiercely I refused even to stand   

beside him for this picture — how I shrank   

back from his hand and found the other side.   

Forever now, for future family,   

we will be framed like this, although no one   

will wonder at the way we are arranged.   

No one will ever wonder, since we'll be   

forever smiling there — our mouths all teeth.

Diane Thiel

6. On a portrait of a deaf man

The kind old face, the egg-shaped head,

The tie, discreetly loud,

The loosely fitting shooting clothes,

A closely fitting shroud.

He liked old city dining rooms,

Potatoes in their skin,

But now his mouth is wide to let

The London clay come in.

He took me on long silent walks

In country lanes when young.

He knew the names of ev'ry bird

But not the song it sung.

And when he could not hear me speak

He smiled and looked so wise

That now I do not like to think

Of maggots in his eyes.

He liked the rain-washed Cornish air

And smell of ploughed-up soil,

He liked a landscape big and bare

And painted it in oil.

But least of all he liked that place

Which hangs on Highgate Hill

Of soaked Carrara-covered earth

For Londoners to fill.

He would have liked to say goodbye,

Shake hands with many friends,

In Highgate now his finger-bones

Stick through his finger-ends.

You, God, who treat him thus and thus,

Say "Save his soul and pray."

You ask me to believe You and

I only see decay.

John Betjeman 

(see also the discussion and lesson ideas on this poem)