She Walks in Beauty: A Woman's Journey Through Poems by Caroline Kennedy Page B

teaches us our limitations and our strengths. It changes us in constantly unfolding ways and entwines us in the unpredictable mystery of another life.
    The poems in this section start and end with a blessing. They begin with “A Cradle Song” by W. B. Yeats, a lullaby of wonder from a parent to a newborn child. The last poem is Lucille Clifton’s “blessing the boats,” in which she wishes safe passage for a child whose mother’s arms can no longer protect her from the world.
    In motherhood, like poetry, the particular becomes universal. Each detail evokes an entire world of memories. In “Socks,” Sharon Olds describes the feeling of being needed as she lifts her lazy son’s leg to put on his sock, and every mother can feel the dead weight of that heavy leg with her own muscle memory.
    There are also poems about mothers from the child’s point of view. In “Clearances,” the special closeness Seamus Heaney felt when he and his mother peeled potatoes together reminds us that sharing the mundane duties of daily life builds a lifetime of love between parent and child.
    The old-fashioned poem “Somebody’s Mother” by Mary Dow Brine, shares an important theme with Elizabeth Alexander’s modern works “The Dream That I Told My Mother-in-Law” and “Ode.” One of the great gifts of motherhood is the ability to see other people’s children as our own, and to feel that the responsibility of caring for them is ours.
    My aunt Eunice, who founded the Special Olympics, used to quote Henry Ward Beecher, who wrote, “A mother’s heart is a child’s schoolroom.” Our mothers are our first teachers, and we teach others the same lessons we learn from them. As a child, when your mother believes in you, you believe in yourself, and when that happens, there is nothing you can’t do. As a mother, that is the greatest gift we can give to a child.

A Cradle Song
    W. B. YEATS
    The angels are stooping
    Above your bed;
    They weary of trooping
    With the whimpering dead.
    God’s laughing in Heaven
    To see you so good;
    The Sailing Seven
    Are gay with His mood.
    I sigh that kiss you,
    For I must own
    That I shall miss you
    When you have grown.

Notes from the Delivery Room
    LINDA PASTAN
    Strapped down,
    victim in an old comic book,
    I have been here before,
    this place where pain winces
    off the walls
    like too bright light.
    Bear down a doctor says,
    foreman to sweating laborer,
    but this work, this forcing
    of one life from another
    is something that I signed for
    at a moment when I would have signed anything.
    Babies should grow in fields;
    common as beets or turnips
    they should be picked and held
    root end up, soil spilling
    from between their toes—
    and how much easier it would be later,
    returning them to earth.
    Bear up . . . bear down . . . the audience
    grows restive, and I’m a new magician
    who can’t produce the rabbit
    from my swollen hat.
    She’s crowning, someone says,
    but there is no one royal here,
    just me, quite barefoot,
    greeting my barefoot child.

Socks
    SHARON OLDS
    I’ll play Ninja Death with you
    tonight, if you buy new socks, I say
    to our son. After supper he holds out his foot,
    the sock with a hole for its heel, I whisk it
    into the wastebasket. He is tired, allergic,
    his hands full of Ninja Death leaflets,
    I take a sock from the bag, heft his
    Achilles tendon in my palm and pull the
    cotton over the arch and instep,
    I have not done this for years, I feel
    intensely happy, drawing the sock
    up the calf— Other foot —
    as if we are back in the days of my great
    usefulness. We cast the dice
    for how we will fight, I swing my mace ,
    he ducks, parries with his chain , I’m dazed , then
    stunned. Day after day, year after
    year I dressed our little beloveds
    as if it were a life’s work,
    stretching the necks of the shirts to get them
    over their heads, guarding the nape as