The Mother/Child Papers: With a new preface by the author

This Power

‹64› This Power This power we don’t define it Mother, your rooted garden Mother, I address you as if you had dignity running with shopping bags through the litter of a city bargain hunting defying poverty Mother, your folders of secret poems Mother, your boyish energy rheumatic fever struck you in your childhood, anemia, shivering I am taller than you, two inches why are you dancing and whistling Mother, fish in your giant tank Mother, scars puckering your skin reading The Grapes of Wrath to me aloud both of us weeping, hugging old earth trying to open trying to feel the sun this power as once I held my children on my shoulders one after the other in a swimming pool and they jumped, they flew off me, and made a good splash and I fell back, into the water, welcoming this is the way we played one afternoon. ...