Round and round, all day long
NS March 24th, 2009
We are the army of mothering soldiers
Raising the sons who will fight in your wars
We are the army of mothering mothers
Raising the girls who will keep clean your floors
We are the women with eyelids heavy
Coffee our friend and sleep an unknown
We are the women too busy to sit
Yet they say that our job is to just stay at home
We are the feminists who feel abandoned, forgotten
Lost in the shuffle of equal pay rights
We are the feminists whose consciousness soared
Our babies the matches that set us alight
We are the singing, the dancing, the stern
We stagger and skip and fall down
Wiping juice from our tables, our clothing, the cat
And mysterious streaks of brown
We are off-peak travellers, not ’til 9.45
Wearing our sensible boots
“Ladies of leisure” out for the day
Kept hidden away from the Suits
We struggle with prams and bags up the steps
While shouting at children in tow
We are the mothers struggling inside
With darkness that nobody knows
We are the Great Unpaid, the secret untold
Our skills swept under the rug
We are the ones with dusty CVs
Replaced by round-the-knees hugs
We are the tearful, the lonely, the sad
The busy, the happy, the bored
We run the spectrum of motherhood
And then we run it some more
We are the voices behind closed doors
singing the words of that song
We are mothers living the chorus
Round and round all the day long
- Life's Lyrics , Miscellaneous Missives , Parenting 101
- Comments(8)
Genius. Just genius.
That is fantastic, and oh so accurate. You are very talented! Poetry is of such a cathartic nature sometimes, I really should start doing it again.
Loved reading it.
Y’know, I don’t usually go much on homegrown poetry*, but that is excellent, in every sense. So true, so well expressed and so well written.
*yeah, I know, it’s all homegrown at the beginning, but you know what I mean.
Beautiful, and painful. Strikes a chord with me.
Wow – that’s really beautiful.
Thanks everyone. I felt a bit silly posting it as I haven’t written a poem in donkeys years but it just kept running around my head as I was trying to get the baby to sleep and I figured I’d give it a shot. Glad to know it didn’t just make everyone fall around the floor laughing!
[...] Savage offers up a poem on motherhood. Round and round, all day long. The title even sounds like a nursery rhyme, “Genius” as one commenter [...]
That is fantastic! Well done. There’s something very impressive about good poetry writing – like someone who can sing well or play the piano. Three things I’ve always wanted to do, but never been very good at! Definitely strikes a chord with me too x