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The Mother

By Ruth Stone 1915–2011 Ruth Stone

Here where the rooms are dryly still

Who is this dustily asleep

While juicy children run the field?

Where is her ever deepening well

Whose buckets to a fullness dip

For needs compassion must fulfill?

Like freshets they themselves may yield

A little to the turned up cup,

But death is in the long dry spell.

Run children, run, the light grows dull,

And she who keeps the well must sleep,

And rain is unpredictable.

December 1951

Source: Poetry (June 2012).

Biography

Poet Ruth Stone was born in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1915 and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She lived in a rural farmhouse in Vermont for much of her life and received widespread recognition relatively late with the publication of Ordinary Words (1999). The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was soon followed by other award-winning collections, including In the Next Galaxy (2002), winner . . .

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