115 - Wrestling with Daughters

Wrestling with Daughters
By Mary Ellen Le Clair

From the moment we know
A life is there, growing,
We rejoice, worry,
Plan, prepare
That they may know a blest life.

I hear one poet say of Wright, his friend,
He was without skin
In openly embracing
Hills and rivers,
Human loneliness in clumps of evening dusk.
I am familiar with this condition.

At birth each self is enclosed,
One infant snuggles,
The other pushes away
Looking to see
Her father,
Always her father's daughter.

Sweet as wheat and honey
They grow till adolescence
When the other side of the riverbank beckons
With red, juicy pomegranates.
Mother and daughters survive that season.

The counselor said: Not a thing
Wrong with one teenage daughter.

Mary Ellen LeClair is Associate Professor of English at Westchester Community College in New York and coordinator of that school's "Poets and Writers Series." Her poetry has appeared in Esprit, Pebbles, and Buzzard Bay Review.

116 - Wrestling with Daughters

She must only grow thicker skin
To get through life.

The father's daughter, now a mother herself,
Embarrassed by her own father,
Has become him, with his
Critical ways.

For the mother to embrace the father's daughter
Is to know a smooth, suburban, prickly pear;
She comforts herself she has two daughters
She remembers herself and her own mother;

When the mother is hurting,
Lonely for the little girls
Or aching with autumn russet leaves
She remembers
Woundedness is the enduring legacy,
Each daughter comes by her condition naturally.

Each needs only
Walk slowly,
Avoid bruising,
Use this skin
As the poets do.

Like Jacob and the angel, they wrestle,
The mother thinks,
"Open your heart."
Silently she says with Jacob,
" I will not let thee go
Unless thou bless me."