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.
A Mother's love is something that no one can explain, It is made of deep devotion and of sacrifice and pain, It is endless and unselfish and enduring come what may For nothing can destroy it or take that love away
My dad was an incredibly brave man, completely dedicated to his family, with a love for all. If I could be half the dad he was, to my children, then that will be an achievement in itself. He died 14 months exactly to the start of the 2012 Olympics. I hope he will be watching and waving his big union jack in London from somewhere else. I love you so much dad.
Not only would I say that the family is important for the evangelization of the new world. The family is important, and it is necessary for the survival of humanity. Without the family, the cultural survival of the human race would be at risk. The family, whether we like it or not, is the foundation.
There's a schizoid streak within the family anyway so I dare say that I'm affected by that. The majority of the people in my family have been in some kind of mental institution, as for my brother he doesn't want to leave. He likes it very much.
After my mom died, there was so much written about her fashion and her style and all that, and I felt that one of the most important parts of her was missing, her real intellectual curiosity.
I explained to my kids at an early age: I'm a normal dad with an abnormal job.
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