Introduction by Ted Kooser: During our more than four years of publishing this column we’ve shown you a number of poems about motherhood. Here’s another, beautifully observed by Liz Rosenberg, who lives in New York State.

I Leave Her Weeping

I leave her weeping in her barred little bed,

her warm hand clutching at my hand,

but she doesn’t want a kiss, or to hug the dog goodnight—

she keeps crying mommy, uhhh, mommy,

with her lovely crumpled face

like a golden piece of paper I am throwing away.

We have been playing for hours,

and now we need to stop, and she does not want

to. She is counting on me to lower the boom

that is her heavy body, and settle her down.

I rub her ribcage, I arrange the blankets around her hips.

Downstairs are lethal phonecalls I have to answer.

Friends

dying, I need to call.

My daughter may be weeping all my tears,

I only know

that even this young

and lying on her side,

her head uplifted like a cupped tulip,

sometimes she needs to cry.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by Liz Rosenberg, whose most recent book of poetry is “Demon Love,” Mammoth Press, 2009. Poem reprinted from “Paterson Literary Review,” Issue 37/2009-2010, by permission of Liz Rosenberg and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2010 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.