One of my main wishes in wanting to write about my mother was to explore the impact of her death on my life, explore our relationship, think about the different versions of myself that I was with and without her. I also had the really strong wish to bring her to life for my children, who were born after she was gone.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the profound impact of a mother's death and the desire to keep her memory alive for future generations.
Tracy K. Smith expresses a deep yearning to understand the influence her mother had on her life, particularly after her passing. She emphasizes the importance of exploring their relationship and how it shaped her identity, as well as her wish to share her mother's legacy and essence with her children, ensuring that they have a connection to their grandmother despite never having met her.
In practice
In a speech about personal loss, one might quote this to illustrate the lasting impact of a mother's presence in one's life.
We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.
I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.
I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that's as out there as alien life.
Losing my father made me want to find out if I could come up with a version of God or the afterlife that I could feel like was acceptable now that both my parents are in it.
Prose is something that is persistent in staying in one place long enough to not only zero in on the dramatic effect of something that might have happened, or something that might have been seen, but also in watching how it played out and thinking about the cause and the effect.
A question is a pursuit, an invitation to envision and explore a series of possibilities, to struggle and empathize and doubt and believe. The question moves, whereas our sense of what an answer is can often be static, a stopping point.
The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.
I'm drawn to kids that are already born. I think some people are meant to do certain things, and I believe I'm meant to find my children in the world somewhere and not necessarily have them genetically.
All of us have moments in our lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.
We can't form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives them to us.
I know how sobering and exhausting parenthood is. But the reality is that our children's future depends on us as parents. Because we know that the first years truly last forever.
Reading was a huge part of my life as a child - we were a family of storytellers.
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