Motherhood

Poems About Mothers

From tenth-century Japan’s Izumi Shikibu, colonial America’s Anne Bradstreet, and Victorian England’s Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Israel’s Yehuda Amichai, Ireland’s Paul Muldoon, and Russia’s Anna Akhmatova, poets across the centuries and around the world have immortalized this elemental relationship.

Among the more than seventy poets in this anthology:

• Audre Lorde recalls “How the days went / While you were blooming within me.”
• Jor…