Disciplines [If there is prayer, there is a mother kneeling]- Poets.org

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Dawn Lundy Martin

Co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation in New York, Dawn Lundy Martin was selected by Carl Phillips for the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for her debut collection A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering...
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	FURTHER READING


		Poems About Mothers
		Kaddish, Part I by Allen Ginsberg

		Chorus by Catherine Barnett

		Exile by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

		Getting Close by Victoria Redel

		Jugglers by Francisco Aragón

		Lucky by Tony Hoagland

		Mama, Come Back by Nellie Wong

		Metamorphosis by James Richardson

		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 Robert Louis Stevenson

		To My Mother by Edgar Allan Poe

		To My Mother by Christina Rossetti

		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


		Related Prose
		Books Noted Dawn Lundy Martin, Discipline

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Disciplines [If there is prayer, there is a mother kneeling]
by Dawn Lundy Martin

If there is prayer, there is a mother kneeling, hands folded to a private sign. We recognize it. If there is a mother kneeling, hands a tent, she is praying or she is crying or crying and praying at the same time. Although it is recognized, the signals of it, it is private and no one knows, perhaps not even she, the content of the prayer, and perhaps its object. If there is a mother praying, she is on her kneels over some object, as one does not often pray in the middle of the room. One prays at the window or over the bed, the head bent slightly up or down, the eyes open or closed. This is a prayer for prayers, you know, a wanting something equal to a prayer, even though I am not a mother.

Originally appeared in jubilat. Copyright © 2010 by Dawn Lundy Martin. Used by permission of the author.

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