Childhood Poems
Verses that remember what it felt like to be young.
These poems stay close to specific, unglamorous detail - a well that stayed cool all summer, an unhurried boredom that doesn't exist anymore - rather than a general fondness for being young. Explore family memory further in our Father poems.
I know her hands better than my own—
the way they move through every ordinary task,
the way they carry without complaint,
the way they answer before I ask.
Those hands braided hair and dried my tears,
clapped at every...
Her voice was the first safe thing I knew,
before my eyes could make much sense,
before the world had shown its shape—
her voice was the first evidence
that I was not alone in it,
that someone warm was...
Popular Poems Topics for You.
Now that I am older I can see
the things she hid from me so carefully—
the worry that wore her face at night,
the sacrifice she made look light and free.
She gave from empty, never showing empty,
she...
Her love is like a steady light—
not the flash of fireworks overhead,
not the brilliant sudden burning,
but the lamp beside the bed.
The one that's always on when you come home,
the one that doesn't flicker or go...
Father Poems
She braided my hair in the morning
while humming a song she half-remembered,
the mirror holding both our faces
in the light of those Octobers and Decembers.
I did not know then what I was holding—
I thought it ordinary,...
There is a smell that returns me immediately—
her kitchen at the end of the day,
the spices and the warmth and the particular
music that her cooking used to play.
I can make the recipe exactly—
I have the...
The silver in her hair is the accounting
of every night she prayed us through a storm,
of every time she put our needs above her own
and called it ordinary, nothing more.
Each strand a worry quietly dissolved,
each...
We ran barefoot through the summer grass
without once considering the glass—
the world was large enough to run in,
the afternoon too long to be slow.
The grass knew our weight by heart,
the path knew where we always...
We played until the darkness came to find us—
not until a clock said time was up,
but until the light itself recalled us,
the dusk the only stop.
No one wanted to be the first to leave—
the game...
Freedom Poems
She told her stories in the language of her hands,
the gestures filling in what words could not—
the demon larger than she could describe,
the hero braver than any school had taught.
We sat in the circle of her...
The backpack was too big for the child carrying it—
it listed to the left on the way in,
but the pride was larger than the backpack,
and the pride leaned into it with a grin.
First day: the smell...
Summer vacation was its own country—
a place that operated by different laws,
no alarm, no schedule, no particular purpose
except the great, ungoverned because.
The days were long in the way that only childhood
manages to stretch and hold...
There was a tree that let me be a king—
the highest branch my throne, the sky my kingdom,
and from up there the neighborhood was miniature,
the adults small and robbed of their dominion.
I went there when I...
We heard it two streets away and ran—
the music that preceded it by far,
the bell of the ice cream man approaching,
the summer's own particular avatar.
Every pocket emptied of its coins,
every coin assessed for its potential,...
Hope Poems
The chalk dust in the morning light—
it fell in the sunbeam like slow snow,
and the blackboard held yesterday's erased lesson
in the ghost of what the chalk would show.
We filed in with our noise and our notebooks,...
I wrote my name for the first time at a desk
that was too large, on paper that was clean—
the letters large and labored and imperfect,
the most important thing I'd ever seen.
My name: a thing I had...
The bell rang and we were released—
the classroom emptied in the ancient way,
the playground receiving us with its particular noise,
the ten minutes that redeemed the day.
We ran with the specific joy of the unconfined,
we played...
What was in your lunch box was a window—
into the home you came from, the hands that packed,
the particular love of whichever parent
had assembled what the morning lacked.
We traded pieces of our lunches willingly—
your mother's...
The library was the room that held the whole world—
every country, every century, every mind—
arranged along the shelves in quiet order,
waiting for the right reader to find.
I went there when the outside was too loud,
when...
Life Poems
I carried the envelope home with care—
or with the deliberate slowness of the dreading—
the report card with its columns of assessment
and the comment that my parents would be reading.
The number on the page was not my...
