December 21, 2009

Prayer for Our Daughters

Mark Jarman is a teacher of mine. I encountered this poem several years back alongside an interview with Mark in an issue of The Writer's Chronicle. My oldest was nearly six months old at the time, and I so appreciated the way it named my wishes for her, reaching from the hope that she "never be lonely at parties," to the broader wish that if she forget herself that "it be in music / or the kind of prayer that makes a garden of thinking."

The first time I heard Mark speak about poetry, I was grateful for his willingness to connect poetry and prayer. And here he offers a series of blessings that I will surely repeat many times on behalf of my daughters. I love the way he closes: "And may they find themselves, as we have found them, / complete at each stage of their lives, each part they add to." I re-see this in my children every day: they instantly become the accumulation of all they have been and all they are becoming. It is wondrous.

4 comments:

  1. Dear Peter,

    Thank you for posting my poem. The version posted on The New Criterion is lacking its last stanza. It's below.

    Happy new year!~
    Mark

    May they be themselves, long after we've stopped watching.
    May they return from every kind of suffering,
    Except the last, which doesn't bear repeating,
    And be themselves again, both blessed and blessing.

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  2. Dear Mark,

    Thank you for including this final stanza here. These seem among the biggest prayers of all. Do you know why The New Criterion version does not include this stanza?

    The first line of it makes me think of Randall Jarrell's "The Lost Children," when the child grows and the poem says:

    as the child learns
    To take care of herself, you know her less.
    Her accidents, adventures are her own,
    You lose track of them. Still, you know more
    About her than anyone except her.

    Wishing you a very Merry Christmas.

    All my best,
    Peter

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  3. Dear Peter,

    In order to see all of anything posted on New Criterion, you have to be a subscriber.

    I think Randall Jarrell writes the best poems about children growing up.

    Happy new year!
    Mark

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  4. i love reading this as your daughter sleeps (soundly?) in the next room. i love these prayers for our children. (and i adore that final stanza.)

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