Vox Populi
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Emily Suzanne Carlson: Motherhood
Instead of the quiet night
in which I place him in the crib
and pull a yellow
blanket to his chin, I’m abroad
in my twenties, whispering
an alphabet I don’t know
in an empty room. Airstrikes
on the border, cluster
bombs, oil clouding water,
white phosphorus. What is here
and gone. I believed
I wouldn’t survive if
I saw the tanks—
their toothed wheels
and periscopes that hid
each human face. I left
before they reached
where I had stood. But
tonight in the states
when I push the curtain aside
officers with assault rifles
hunch in the tulips. The silence
of just-before. Of
what if? Of you are here
beside me but I don’t know
about afterward. And there
it is, the thing I’ve most feared—
a tank waits in the emptied
street, complete with a
gun turret. How ridiculous
it looks. What else can I do
but open the front door
and walk past the dogwood trees
in full bloom toward it. I want
the officers to hang their shields
like wind chimes from the plum tree’s
branches. To walk barefoot
on the rich soil. I want the tank
to become what it
once was. Billion-year-old rock.
Fusion element in stars. In the same
night, in the same poem,
but later, I reach into the dark
and touch my sleeping child.
Copyright 2024 Emily Suzanne Carlson.
Emily Suzanne Carlson’s Why Misread a Cloud was selected by Kimiko Hahn as the winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Award. Carlson lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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There is a world in this lovely, difficult poem ❤️
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A whole world with love and death, tenderness and fear.
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This poem is stunning in its movement from crib to tank to violence and back.
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Exactly.
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Yes, my nightmares. I grew up with the tanks and the shooting and the uniforms and “the silence of just before”. Powerful poem.
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My wife’s parents grew up in Germany during WWII. Klaus, my father in law, was a child of nine hiding under the stairs when the British dropped a bomb on the house. Everything but the stairs were destroyed. Klaus scrambled out into the burning ruins, not seriously hurt, thank god. Mia, my mother in law, nearly starved to death on her family farm one winter. Little boys love to play war, but adults should know better.
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Well, there are the ‘little boys’, of course. And I think we all learn. But then there is so much money to made through war, and they don’t give a flying f*k about the boys who will die in these war, that we’ll never clamber out of the deep holes they’re digging for us time and time gain.
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Motherhood, torn. Poignant.
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Yes, mothers are tender to their children but fierce toward the world.
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Wow! This is one I will read again and again. Thank you.
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Thank YOU, Barbara. Your daily comments are so spot on.
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As from Emily De Ferrari….this poem is necessary……and fearless.
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Emily Carlson sings our connections with each other and the world around us without fearing to point the arrow of motherhood straight into the face of that which threatens our common humanity, while simultaneously holding that humanity with love. This poem is so necessary.
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Well said, Emily. Thank you. Carlson is a new discovery for me. I’m surprised by the quiet passion and crisp clarity of her poems.
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