I Leave Her Weeping

By Liz Rosenberg Liz Rosenberg

I leave her weeping in her barred little bed,

her warm hand clutching at my hand,

but she doesn’t want a kiss, or to hug the dog goodnight—

she keeps crying mommy, uhhh, mommy,

with her lovely crumpled face

like a golden piece of paper I am throwing away.

We have been playing for hours,

and now we need to stop, and she does not want

to. She is counting on me to lower the boom

that is her heavy body, and settle her down.

I rub her ribcage, I arrange the blankets around her hips.

Downstairs are lethal phonecalls I have to answer.

Friends

dying, I need to call.

My daughter may be weeping all my tears,

I only know

that even this young

and lying on her side,

her head uplifted like a cupped tulip,

sometimes she needs to cry.

Poem copyright ©2009 by Liz Rosenberg, whose most recent book of poetry is Demon Love, Mammoth Press, 2009. Poem reprinted from Paterson Literary Review, Issue 37/2009-2010, by permission of Liz Rosenberg and the publisher.

Biography

A children’s book author and novelist, Liz Rosenberg attended Bennington College and earned a PhD from SUNY Binghamton. Her collections of poetry include The Fire Music (1986), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starret Prize; Children of Paradise: Poems (1994); These Happy Eyes (2001); The Lily Poems (2008), a chapbook; and Demon Love (2008).

Rosenberg has edited a number of anthologies of poetry for young readers, among them The . . .

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