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# Poem for my sons
- URL: https://poetry101.love/poem-for-my-sons/
- Published: 2024-06-02T14:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2024-06-03T16:16:43.000Z
- Description: by Minnie Bruce Pratt
- Author: Melissa Anderson
- Tags: #Import 2026-11-04 19:11

When you were born, all the poets I knew  
were men, dads eloquent on their sleeping  
babes and the future: Coleridge at midnight,  
Yeats' prayer that his daughter lack opinions,  
his son be high and mighty, think, and act.  
You've read the new father's loud eloquence,  
fiery sparks written in a silent house  
breathing with the mother's exhausted sleep.  
  
When you were born, my first, what I thought was  
milk: my breasts sore, engorged, but not enough  
when you woke. With you, my youngest, I did not  
think: my head unraised for three days, mind-dead  
from waist-down anesthetic labor, saddle  
block, no walking either.  
Your father was then  
the poet I'd ceased to be when I got married.  
It's taken me years to write this to you.  
  
I had to make a future, willful, voluble,  
lascivious, a thinker, a long walker,  
unstruck transgressor, furious, shouting,  
voluptuous, a lover, a smeller of blood,  
milk, a woman mean as she can be some nights,  
existence I could pray to, capable of  
poetry.  
Now here we are. You are men,  
and I am not the woman who rocked you  
in the sweet reek of penicillin, sour milk,  
the girl who could not imagine herself  
or a future more than a warm walled room,  
had no words but the pap of the expected,  
and so, those nights, could not wish for you.  
  
But now I have spoken, my self, I can ask  
for you: that you'll know evil when you smell it;  
that you'll know good and do it, and see how both  
run loose through your lives; that then you'll remember  
you come from dirt and history; that you'll choose  
memory, not anesthesia; that you'll have work  
you love, hindering no one, a path crossing  
at boundary markers where you question power;  
that your loves will match you thought for thought  
in the long heat of blood and fact of bone  
  
Words not so romantic nor so grandly tossed  
as if I'd summoned the universe to be  
at your disposal.  
can only pray:  
  
That you'll never ask for the weather, earth,  
angels, women, or other lives to obey you;  
  
that you'll remember me, who crossed, recrossed you,  
as a woman making slowly toward  
an unknown place where you could be with me,  
like a woman on foot, in a long stepping out.