The Mother

“The Lovers of the Poor” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1963)

This is another one of Brooks’s most well-known poems, and one of her longest. She employs perfect as well as slant rhyme, as well as iambic pentameter. Brooks’s third-person perspective follows the story most closely to the well-off Ladies of the Ladies’ Betterment League, examining social injustice from the perspective of unsympathetic oppressors.

“After Apple Picking” by Robert Frost (1914)

A significant departure in content from Gwendolyn Brooks, she and Robert Frost share the distinction of being influential 20th-century American poets. In “After Apple Picking,” Frost uses and breaks his rhyming rule freely:

I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin

The rumbling sound

Of load on load of apples coming in.

For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired (Lines 23-29).

The uneven meter and easy form give the poem a raw, intimate feeling. Moments of vulnerability in this poem are less gave than in “the mother,” though still poignant.

“Mothers” by Nikki Giovanni (1972)

This poem explores a mother-child relationship from the perspective of the child. Like Brooks, Giovanni limits her use of capital letters to keep the poem grounded. Race and gender intermingle in this poem, rendering a complicated image of intergenerational trauma and joy.

“The Golden Shovel” by Terrance Hayes (2010)

Hayes creates a new form out of Brooks’s 1960 poem “We Real Cool” (Poets.org). In “We Real Cool,” the word “we” is a refrain at the end of nearly every line:

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk Late. We

Strike Straight. We (Lines 1-4).

Hayes innovates further by ending each line with a word from “We Real Cool” through the first section, and then again through a second section.