Day of the Child - A Poem

Day of the Child ebbs and flows, expanding and contracting, reflective of the altered movement of time that passes through the tangle of motherhood and childhood.

List of contents

CONTENTS

a poem

[1] The time-passing: your waterproof watch reads

[3] derive not first from reason. Of Passion

[5] By the time you are five, we make metaphors

[7] You move too fast to catch, erasing, from mind

[9] Go back to the boy jumping in barn hay

[11] Again, morning’s make: walking, a mother deer

[13] Uphold heaven—humble & hurting, here—rapt

[15] More magic: Morning. Choose a card, remember

[17] Early light winds loose the air balloon curtains.

[19] Inside me I saw your heart. Made visible

[21] Seven years blink: on river, rain’s ink and bow

[23] made meal. Of butterflies & milkweed & moon

[25] My own: on the hard floor, refuses

[27] and dappled bay until the river, morning gray

[29] The thread thins. December. Paris

[31] —Fine snow settles on the locusts’ fallen branches

[33] in plastic cups the milky liquid poured.

[35] Of what is made merriment? Or, Innate

[37] Until we make late February. Snow’s

[39] In the Living Room, the staple gun claps

[41] I sing what you cannot hear in spoken words:

[43] A verb-poem. In winter, he writes: Blossoms

[45] September 21, 2012: you (five) over me rolled



[47] by what-you-would-become. Un-willed

[49] “With all my heart,” nuzzling his bed head

[51] Spring blinks. Then, August’s amber light. The cicada

[53] and the bright blue blurred, in air, away. Ancient chant

[55] The blue ball lies on the thick lawn, half-shadow

[57] If I could, again: us, on the back deck, in sun

[59] I waited for you to say you love me

[61] I had a lot of fun, but now I’m old and gray

[63] (would, of him, make a single blip) and trace

[65] Children, perhaps, more than any, know, their bones

[67] The butterflies are hatching in Dow Gardens’

[69] A day of hardness in the heart, though I run

[71] After dragging to Flagler’s frog fountain

[73] Some redbud saplings have not, I think, made it

[75] as his father sifts for shark’s teeth among shells

[77] I go far away, to write. To Belgium

[79] At nine, you come, most, to me, hurt or angry

[81] The Narrow roads I walk, outside Olsene

[83] when by me in the dusk my child sits down

[85] By your works shall ye be known, my paper-folder

[87] A kind of intoxication, rising up

[89] I hang, on the line, laundry’s smell like wind.

[91] Near evening. Long-limbed, tawny, lacquered shadows

[93] Fever-gaunt, trembling, short of breath to speak

[95] me half-way down the gravel, rain-rutted, drive

[97] Learning to speak, you would mirror our words

[99] Big elephant hang up towel, you said

About the author

Arra Lynn Ross is the author of Day of the Child and Seedlip and Sweet Apple. She is a poet, essayist, and puppet worker whose work has appeared in Passages North, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Birmingham Poetry Review, Antioch Review, and the Iowa Review. She lives in Michigan.

Summary

Day of the Child ebbs and flows, expanding and contracting, reflective of the altered movement of time that passes through the tangle of motherhood and childhood.

Additional text

Praise for Seedlip and Sweet Apple

“Situated between glossary and glossolalia, word and vision, the communal act of language and the singularity of inspiration, Seedlip and Sweet Apple reaffirms the tradition of American visionaries, even while reshaping that tradition into an innovative and dynamic lyric. Arra Lynn Ross raises the roof with her convocation of tongues. A pioneering collection of poems.”—D. A. Powell



“A creative and compelling rendering of a strange and charismatic leader. Arra Lynn Ross’s poems catch the dangers and the challenges of this woman who heard God’s whisperings, lost four children to early deaths, journeyed to the New World in 1744, used her body with others to warm a room with dance, and rejoiced in the sight of a deer or the pleasures of watching rosehip tea steaming in the sun.”—Spirituality & Practice

“A work powerful in voice and craft . . . If you care about the value of our national literature, Seedlip and Sweet Apple is well worth the investment.”—Feminist Review

“Seedlip and Sweet Apple marks the birth of a star. Radical and transgressive young poet and writer Arra Lynn Ross has made a miraculous text of narrative and speech fragments . . . to raise up Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, her ecstatic voice, energy, and vision. If, as Yeats promised, ‘soul clap its hands and sing,’ here she is, on the page, in the ear: Ann Lee in the historical world, harmed and holy, brave, alive and in community, ‘a woman sowing seeds at the break of day.’”—Hilda Raz



“Arra Lynn Ross’s powerful collection inevitably recalls Robert Peters’s The Gift to Be Simple and she is no less penetrating of Mother Ann’s psyche. But whereas Peters’s stubby-lined, intense, physical style kindled fire, Ross’s longer lines, occasional prose poems and narrative episodes, documentary interjections, and employment of voices other than Ann’s feel broader, cooler, more rested in the Lord, at last.”—Booklist

Product details

• Authors: Arra Lynn Ross
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 09.11.2021
• EAN: 9781571315373
• ISBN: 978-1-57131-537-3
• No. of pages: 96
• Illustrations: Cover art by the author's son
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; POETRY / American / General, POETRY / Women Authors, Narrative theme: Love & relationships, Modern & contemporary poetry (c 1900 onwards), Poetry / Poems