ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Amanda Moore’s poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including ZZYZVA, Cream City Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and Best New Poets, and she is the recipient of writing awards from The Writing Salon, Brush Creek Arts Foundation, and The Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. A current Writer’s Grotto Fellow and high school English teacher, she lives by the beach in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco with her husband and daughter.
Confession
In the chapel of our first days,
I put you to my breast again and again
and let you refuse me.
Half-life half-lived and with you
as my witness: I have been more
mother than woman. I have stayed
up all night lining the shelves of my life
with your toys and books.
It might be a comfort,
the way my whole world spins
on the tip of your smallest toe,
but you will learn to be a woman
from the way I am a woman in this world
and this is the litany of my mistake:
I did not know what I was doing. I was happy
to be a martyr. This won’t be the last time
I will say it. Daughter, I was wrong.
”Confession” comes from the disorienting days of early motherhood, a time when I struggled to draw a line between the image I had of a good mom and abject self-sacrifice. In the poem, I wanted to play with the idea of confessing maternal sins and shortcomings, something I often heard other new mothers do as a means of seeking reassurance from one another, but recast the exchange. Instead of a confession between adults, I chose to have the speaker confess directly to the daughter. The sins she confesses are not in feeding, clothing, playing with, or engaging her daughter wrong, some of the big inadequacies I felt as a new mom, but in being too much a mother — a martyr, almost — instead of preserving and projecting a sense of self and independence. The daughter may indeed be momentarily comfortable with the fruits of a mother concerned with nothing but her care, but at what cost in the end?
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
