Letting go

 These poems beautifully address the bittersweet experience of parting with our grown up daughters.

First Thanksgiving

Sharon Olds

When she comes back, from college, I will see

the skin of her upper arms, cool,

matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old

soupy chest against her breasts,

I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment,

her sleep like an untamed, good object,

like a soul in a body. She came into my life the

second great arrival, after him, fresh

from the other world—which lay, from within him,

within me. Those nights, I fed her to sleep,

week after week, the moon rising,

and setting, and waxing—whirling, over the months,

in a slow blur, around our planet.

Now she doesn’t need love like that, she has

had it. She will walk in glowing, we will talk,

and then, when she’s fast asleep, I’ll exult

to have her in that room again,

behind that door! As a child, I caught

bees, by the wings, and held them, some seconds,

looked into their wild faces,

listened to them sing, then tossed them back

into the air—I remember the moment the

arc of my toss swerved, and they entered

the corrected curve of their departure.

Sharon Olds, “First Thanksgiving” from Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002.

RESTLESS GHOSTS

Margaret Meade

That I be not a restless ghost

Who haunts your footsteps as they pass

Beyond the point where you have left

Me standing in the new sprung grass,

You must be free to take a path

Whose end I feel no need to know,

No irking fever to be sure

You went where I would have you go,

Those who would fence the future in

Between two walls of well-laid stones

But lay a ghost walk for themselves,

A dreary walk for dusty bones.

So you can go without regret

Away from this familiar land,

Leaving your kiss upon my hair

And all the future in your hands.

Margaret Mead

Blackberry Winter

Mead wrote this to her daughter, her only child , when she made her a grandmother.