Day of the Child A Poem

From Arra Lynn Ross, a tender, generous, and generative extended poem centered on the experience of parenthood."What is learned? I'll return for my son; / at school, at three thirty-eight, bells will ring & run / days over years." Using unpredictable syllabics, rhyme, and syntax, Day of the Child captures the sensation of altered time that accompanies a child's growth. Seasons come and go. A schoolboy becomes a dreaming infant becomes a five-year-old exploring metaphor for the first time becomes an ultrasound image, "a frieze on screen." A mother cycles through her own often dissonant identities: "soother, watcher, blame-taker." And both mother and child assume another, significant role: artistic collaborators.For Day of the Child is a poem co-created by child and mother, offering a space in which each's stories, thoughts, words-"unbound / by Time & time's delineations"-tangle together. In which apartness-"Oh indivisible divisible," the presence of another heart beating inside the mother's own body-is continually negotiated. And in which the mother considers her place as intermediary between the child and the world: her protection, her complicity, her joy. Its octave pairs ebb and flow, expand and contract, producing a portrait of raising another human as refracted as it is circular, just as a river "breaks into many suns, the sun." For, as the child asserts, "love is a circl[e] round / as a Ball."Challenging the notion that parenthood is not itself a poetic endeavor, Day of the Child makes of childrearing "a refrain I reframed each day with new words."

ISBN:	9781571315373
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Imprint:	Milkweed Editions
Published date:	09 Nov 2021
DEWEY:	811.6
DEWEY edition:	23
Language:	English
Number of pages:	51
Weight:	113g
Height:	216mm
Width:	140mm
Spine width:	8mm

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