Day of the Child

A Poem

Arra Lynn Ross

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781571315373
• eBook ISBN: 9781571317506
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

From Arra Lynn Ross, a tender, generous, and generative extended poem centered on the experience of parenthood.

"What is learned? I'll return for my son; / at school, at three thirty-eight, bells will ring & run / days over years." Using unpredictable syllabics, rhyme, and syntax, Day of the Child captures the sensation of altered time that accompanies a child's growth. Seasons come and go. A schoolboy becomes a dreaming infant becomes a five-year-old exploring metaphor for the first time becomes an ultrasound image, "a frieze on screen." A mother cycles through her own often dissonant identities: "soother, watcher, blame-taker." And both mother and child assume another, significant role: artistic collaborators.

For Day of the Child is a poem co-created by child and mother, offering a space in which each's stories, thoughts, words—"unbound / by Time & time's delineations"—tangle together. In which apartness—"Oh indivisible divisible, " the presence of another heart beating inside the mother's own body—is continually negotiated. And in which the mother considers her place as intermediary between the child and the world: her protection, her complicity, her joy. Its octave pairs ebb and flow, expand and contract, producing a portrait of raising another human as refracted as it is circular, just as a river "breaks into many suns, the sun." For, as the child asserts, "love is a circl[e] round /as a Ball."

Challenging the notion that parenthood is not itself a poetic endeavor, Day of the Child makes of childrearing "a refrain I reframed each day with new words."

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 | The time-passing: your waterproof watch reads
• Acknowledgments