Chorus

Catherine Barnett

So who mothers the mothers

who tend the hallways of mothers,

the spill of mothers, the smell of mothers,

who mend the eyes of mothers,

the lies of mothers scared

to turn on lights in basements

filled with mothers called by mothers in the dark,

the kin of mothers, the gin of mothers,

mothers out on bail,

who mothers the hail-mary mothers

asleep in their stockings

while the crows sing heigh ho carrion crow,

fol de riddle, lol de riddle,

carry on, carry on—

Living Room Altar by Catherine Barnett
Except for the shirt pulled from the ocean,

Providence by Catherine Barnett
This evening I shared a cab with a priest

Sojourn by Catherine Barnett
My son took a picture of me

Sweet Double, Talk-Talk [iv.] by Catherine Barnett
I know agape means both dumbly

Textbook & Absence (Anatomy) by Catherine Barnett
At school he studies the human body

		Poems About Mothers
		Disciplines [If there is prayer, there is a mother kneeling] by Dawn Lundy Martin
		Kaddish, Part I by Allen Ginsberg
		Exile by Alicia Suskin Ostriker
		Jugglers by Francisco Aragón
		Lucky by Tony Hoagland
		Mama, Come Back by Nellie Wong
		Mother by Herman de Coninck
		Mother by Lola Ridge
		Mother Ann Tells Lucy What Gave Her Joy by Arra Lynn Ross
		Mother o' Mine by Rudyard Kipling
		Mother's Day by David Young
		My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer by Mark Strand
		My Mother Was No White Dove by Reginald Shepherd
		My Mother Would Be a Falconress by Robert Duncan
		My Mother's Funeral by Ira Sadoff
		Parents by William Meredith
		Picking Up by Evelyn Duncan
		Poems about Motherhood
		Postpartum by Hiromi Itō
		She Leaves Me Again, Six Months Later by Collier Nogues
		The Player Queen by W. B. Yeats
		The Routine Things Around the House by Stephen Dunn
		The Visit by Jason Shinder
		To My Mother by Edgar Allan Poe
		To My Mother by Christina Rossetti
		To My Mother by Robert Louis Stevenson
		To My Mother Waiting on 10/01/54 by Teresa Carson
		Untitled [A house just like his mother's] by Gregory Orr
		Wedding Cake by Naomi Shihab Nye
		[Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome] by Christina Rossetti