Ten years ago, Beth Greenspan put a poem in her wallet that she’s
carried ever since. Her son was just on the verge of adolescence, and
she was wistful. “I noticed that his wrists were starting to get
thicker, his hands were starting to look bigger. His hand was almost
the size of my own hand.”
Her mother saw Mary Karr [http://www.marykarr.com/]’s “Entering
the Kingdom” published in The New Yorker, clipped it, and sent it to
her. “The moment I received it, it was as if someone had given me a
map and painted a picture for me of where we were going.”
(Read the poem below
[http://www.studio360.org/2013/may/10/aha-moment-mary-karr-entering-the-kingdom/#poem])
> As the boys bones lengthened,
> and his head and heart enlarged,
> his mother one day failed
>
> to see herself in him.
> He was a man then, radiating
> the innate loneliness of men.
>
> His expression was ever after
> beyond her. When near sleep
> his features eased towards childhood,
>
> it was brief.
> She could only squeeze
> his broad shoulder. What could
>
> she teach him
> of loss, who now inflicted it
> by entering the kingdom
>
> of his own will?
Greenspan still takes the poem out of her wallet and reads it from
time to time; her son is now 20, away at college, and she finds it
comforting. “As a parent, your job from the minute your child is
born is to create an exit ramp away from you. And it’s what has to
happen and it’s what every parent wants to have happen, yet at the
same time you find that you long for what was.”
→ Is there a poem, painting, or any other work of art that’s
changed your life?
Tell us in a comment below.
