Poems for Mother’s Day
Contemporary poems for and about the moms in our lives.
Remember how much your mom loved those handmade cards you scribbled for her as a child? This year, you can give her something equally heartfelt: the gift of a poem. We’ve assembled a collection of poems for and by mothers and grandmothers. Some of them would make an excellent accompaniment to breakfast in bed. Others reflect the grief and pain that Mother’s Day can bring to those who have lost their mothers, or whose relationships with them remain complicated. We hope there’s something here for everyone, to help celebrate the moms in our lives.
The Mothering Blackness
Maya Angelou
- Martha Zweig
From the magazine:
The Breakfast Nook
On Mother's Day
Bruce Lansky
The Bad Mother
Susan Griffin
- Idrissa Simmonds
From the magazine:
Flight
- Danielle Chapman
From the magazine:
Catch-All
- Raymond Antrobus
From the magazine:
Maybe my most important identity is being a son
- Sharon Olds
From the magazine:
MOTHER
To My Mother
Edgar Allan Poe
Rock Me to Sleep
Elizabeth Akers Allen
How You Know
Joe Mills
After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
Galway Kinnell
- Craig Santos Perez
From the magazine:
From “understory”
Elegy for 39
Paul Killebrew
- Gregory Djanikian
From the magazine:
I Ask My Grandmother If We Can Make Lahmajoun
More Blues and the Abstract Truth
C. D. Wright
- Faith Wilson
From the magazine:
lynette #1
- Rhina P. Espaillat
From the magazine:
“Find Work”
The Words Under the Words
Naomi Shihab Nye
Eating the Avocado
Carrie Fountain
The Daughter
Carmen Giménez
If I Sleep While My Baby Sleeps
Alice B. Fogel
Shank
Sally Green
Little Lesson on How to Be
Kathryn Nuernberger
Waterwings
Cathy Song
Pre-Text
Marie Ponsot
What I Carried
Maggie Smith
- Sandra McPherson
From the magazine:
Speech Crush
December, 1919
Claude McKay
- Carolyn Kizer
From the magazine:
The Great Blue Heron
Tintype on the Pond, 1925
J. Lorraine Brown
- Nick Flynn
From the magazine:
Sky Burial
- Judith Kroll
From the magazine:
Your Clothes
A Dandelion for My Mother
Jean Nordhaus
On Receipt Of My Mother's Picture
William Cowper
- Laura Kasischke
From the magazine:
The Eavesdropper, or What I Thought I Heard My Mother Talking About on the Phone, in Another Room, Thirty-Six Years Ago
- Jenn Givhan
From the magazine:
I am dark, I am forest
Transplanting
Lee Ann Roripaugh
Mother's Closet
Maxine Scates
lessons
Jacqueline Woodson
What I Learned From My Mother
Julia Kasdorf
- Kimiko Hahn
From the magazine:
Foreign Body
Mothers
Nikki Giovanni
- Hieu Minh Nguyen
From the magazine:
Changeling
This Be The Verse
Philip Larkin
My Mother’s Closet
Kate Buckley
- Ruby Robinson
From the magazine:
Apology
Chinoisserie
Lynn Emanuel
- Janet McAdams
From the magazine:
Tiger on the Shoulder
From the House of Yemanjá
Audre Lorde
Hello Kitty Virgin Mary
Feliz Lucia Molina
Mother's Day Poems
The Editors
Light & Darkness
Maggie Smith
Super Mom Poets
The Editors
Poems about Children and Parenting
The Editors