This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
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Welcome to Poetry Moment.
Is giving birth a prerequisite to understanding motherhood? In her poem “[If there is prayer, there is a mother kneeling],” Dawn Lundy Martin gives us her answer.
Dawn Lundy Martin is an essayist, conceptual video artist, and author of five books of poems, including Life in a Box is a Pretty Life; which won the Lambda Literary Award, and co-editor with Erica Hunt of Letters to the Future: BLACK WOMEN / Radical WRITING. Recipient of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Martin is Professor of English in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.
In Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mocking Bird, lawyer Atticus Finch famously explains to his daughter Scout, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from [their] point of view…until you climb into [their] skin and walk around in it." Is this true also of parenting?
Although she is not a biological mother, in today’s poem “[If there is prayer, there is a mother kneeling],” Dawn Lundy Martin climbs into the skin of motherhood. From my perspective, she gets it just right.
Here’s “[If there is prayer, there is a mother kneeling]” from Disciplines
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If there is prayer, there is a mother kneeling, hands folded to a private sign. We recognize it. If there is a mother kneeling, hands a tent, she is praying or she is crying or crying and praying at the same time. Although it is recognized, the signals of it, it is private and no one knows, perhaps not even she, the content of the prayer, and perhaps its object. If there is a mother praying, she is on her knees over some object, as one does not often pray in the middle of the room. One prays at the window or over the bed, the head bent slightly up or down, the eyes open or closed. This is a prayer for prayers, you know, a wanting something equal to a prayer, even though I am not a mother.
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Originally appeared in jubilat. Copyright © 2010 by Dawn Lundy Martin. Used by permission of the author.
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That was “[If there is prayer, there is a mother kneeling]” from Disciplines by Dawn Lundy Martin. Thanks for listening.
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Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
