"What I Learned From My Mother" by Julia Spicher Kasdorf

There's so much that I should be working on tonight. It's after 10:00 p.m., but I know that there's research to do, a job description to look at, a long blog post that needs to written, and an HTML workbook to spend time with.


But, for tonight, I just can't do any more. There's a loaf of banana bread rising in the oven, and my cat is playing nearby, bringing me bouncy balls so I can bounce them across the kitchen floor.

This scene does not call for work: it calls for a poem!

"What I Learned From My Mother" comes from Julia Spicher Kasdorf's first book Sleeping Preacher. Julia was my thesis advisor at Penn State, and she is just as kind and warm and caring as this poem is. I was lucky to have her guidance as a poet and as a person during my last year in Pennsylvania.

This poem gets republished often, partially because it makes for a good workshop assignment: you read the poem in a group, talk about it, and then each person writes his or her own poem about learning something from someone.

But I like this poem more for its content than for its formulaic possibilities. It evokes a country neighborly-ness that I very much like. Bringing cakes to mourning families and fruit salads to worried wives seems so strange and old-fashioned and foreign to my generation. But Julia's poem gets right to the heart of why these traditions matter: no matter what sort of spiritual nourishment we would like to offer the suffering, sometimes "a chocolate cake you baked yourself" is all that we have, along with "the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch."

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What I Learned From My Mother
By Julia Spicher Kasdorf
From Sleeping Preacher

I learned from my mother how to love

the living, to have plenty of vases on hand

in case you have to rush to the hospital

with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants

still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars

large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole

grieving household, to cube home-canned pears

and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins

and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.

I learned to attend viewing even if I didn’t know

the deceased, to press the moist hands

of the living, to look in their eyes and offer

sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.

I learned that whatever we say means nothing,

what anyone will remember is that we came.

I learned to believe I had the power to ease

awful pains materially like an angel.

Like a doctor, I learned to create

from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once

you know how to do this, you can never refuse.

To every house you enter, you must offer

healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,

the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.