Explore Poems: Birth & Birthdays

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The Republic of Motherhood
By Liz Berry
I crossed the border into the Republic of Motherhood
and found it a queendom, a wild queendom.
I handed over my clothes and took its uniform,
its dressing gown and undergarments, a cardigan
soft as a creature, smelling of birth and milk,
and I lay...
Torso of Air
By Ocean Vuong
Suppose you do change your life.
& the body is more than

a portion of night––sealed
with bruises. Suppose you woke

& found your shadow replaced
by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful

& gone. So you take the knife to the wall
instead. You carve &...
Sweet Daddy
By Patricia Smith
62. You would have been 62.
I would have given you a Roosevelt Road
kinda time, an all-night jam in a
twine time joint, where you could have
taken over the mike
and crooned a couple.

The place be all blue light
and JB air
and big-legged women
giggling...
What DNA Knows
By Charlotte Pence
What is death to us? We've heard that myth,
a ghost story to tell around a camp fire.
We're too busy to think. Our copies constantly

clamor around our waists like children. They rush
from their cramped classrooms into the red light
of the first...
Madonna Del Parto
By Forrest Gander
And then smelling it,
feeling before
the sound even reaches
him, he kneels at
cliff's edge and for the
first time, turns his
head toward the now
visible falls that
gush over a quarter
mile of uplifted sheet-
granite across the valley
and he pauses,
lowering his eyes
for a moment, unable
to withstand...
April 1984
By Jan-Henry Gray
The young mother born
with the wrong name
boards a plane.
Flanked by
her second and ...
Poem Beginning & Ending with My Birth
By Zeina Hashem Beck
My mother says I sure was heaven-sent
& determined on making her life hell—
cried every afternoon, & not one spell
worked. She rocked, she sang, made all the attempts
of too-young mothers. Don’t they say the scent
of a mother’s neck, & her voice,...
Four Marys
By Paisley Rekdal
Are the drapes drawn open or being closed?
Each of the heavy, velvet wings is clasped
in the hands of a little angel, a little man really,
in the shades of plum and mint green that frame
the birthing tent's opening for a girl
who...
My baby first birthday
By Jenny Zhang
my mother had two vaginas
one to birth me and one to keep me
inside the first one I had two names
my given name and my other given name
my twat had a name too
it was forgotten because the climate changed
the climate changed...
Ruminant
By Clodagh Beresford Dunne
What happens to a heart after death?

It pounds around the rib cage,
at last leaps through the sternum
into the menacing wood.

Grows a coat of fur, thickening around the neck.
Becomes crepuscular,
cannot bear to be seen.

Crumens beneath its beautiful eyes
secrete waxy tears,
its four-chambered...
After Birth
By Devon Walker-Figueroa
Reed, who’s got one strike left before he gets
life, tells me afterbirth is what the cougars are after.
“Lambing season,” he says, “plus, placenta’s a delicacy
to a cat.” I try to explain how

intent they were, how...
Livelong Day
By Angela Leighton
It’s gone thirty years since this light steel disc
warmed to his skin,
sixty and more since I laid my child’s ear
...
- Living
- Birth & Birthdays
- Death
- Sorrow & Grieving
- Youth
- The Mind
- Memory & Nostalgia
- Time & Brevity
- Grief
- + 2 more
Birthday Suits
By J. Jennifer Espinoza
I turned twenty-four and
dad decided to take
another stab at making
a man out of me.
On his command, I drove us
out to Hollywood where
you could get three sets of suits
for a hundred bucks.
What a steal! he exclaimed
as though his enthusiasm
would fertilize
something that...
So
By Michael Lally
I wait and wonder
what I’d do
if someone said pick your 60 best poems.
Pick all of them? Or any?
Maybe commit suicide, but everyone would say
“It’s because he’s really gay,” or...
The Alien
By Greg Delanty
I’m back again scrutinizing the Milky Way
  of your ultrasound, scanning the dark
matter, the nothingness, that now the heads say
is chockablock with quarks and squarks,
gravitons and gravatini, photons and photinos. Our sprout,

who...
Baby Come Today, October 4th
By Bernadette Mayer
Ecstatic experiences with nature
This is an automatic furnace
Do not drop or roll
Do not handle with squeeze lift truck
Handle with care
This is a piece of quality assured
Home heating and cooling equipment
The Ohio Valley Container Corporation
Made its container to stand
A resistance bursting...
sister was the wolf
By Aracelis Girmay
sister was the wolf
& could cross easily through

the mountain dark to den
keen & quivered with

the muscular siege of slit purse
purple with hours

purse purple with birthwork
her sight both inward-

& outward-lit
on what small sparkle of pyrite

in the silt or the thick...
An Entertainment for W.S. Graham for Him Having Reached Sixty-Five
By W. S. Graham
What are you going to do
With what is left of yourself
Now among the rustling
Of your maybe best years?
This is not an auto-elegy
With me pouring my heart
Out into where you
Differently stand or sit
On the Epidaurus steps.
What shall I say to myself
Having...
A World of Daughters
By Yusef Komunyakaa
Say licked clean at birth. Say
weeping in the tall grass, where
this tantalizing song begins,
birds perched on a crooked branch
over a grave of an unending trek
into the valley of cooling waters.
The soil’s thirst, lessons...
Lullabies of Elsewhere
By Chase Twichell
She was always elsewhere.

That’s what Mom wants
carved on her stone.

When did she first realize
there was an Elsewhere,
and that she was in it?

What baby songs did she
sing from wherever she was
down to me in my crib?

The lullabies of Elsewhere.

On birthdays
she ﬁlled...

p1Poem Beginning & Ending with My Birth

p1My baby first birthday

p1Ruminant

p1After Birth

p1Livelong Day

p1Birthday Suits

p1sister was the wolf

p1An Entertainment for W.S. Graham for Him Having Reached Sixty-Five

p1A World of Daughters

p1Lullabies of Elsewhere

Poem Beginning & Ending with My Birth

My baby first birthday

Ruminant

After Birth

Livelong Day

Birthday Suits

sister was the wolf

An Entertainment for W.S. Graham for Him Having Reached Sixty-Five

A World of Daughters

Lullabies of Elsewhere