Ted Kooser, US Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006. Photo by UNL Publications and Photography.

During our more than four years of publishing this column we’ve shown you a number of poems about motherhood. Here’s another, beautifully observed by Liz Rosenberg, who lives in New York State.

I Leave Her Weeping

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.

Ted Kooser was US Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006. He is a professor in the English Department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He lives on an acreage near the village of Garland, Nebraska, with his wife Kathleen Rutledge, the editor of the Lincoln Journal Star.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org),

publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of

Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by Donal Heffernan, whose most recent book of poetry is

“Duets of Motion,” Lone Oak Press, 2001. Poem reprinted by permission of Donal Heffernan.

Introduction copyright ©2010 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

American Life in Poetry ©2006 The Poetry Foundation

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This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.