Joan Baranow is the author of six poetry collections, including Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague, winner of the 2021 Brick Road Poetry Book Contest.
Joanna Clarkson’s poem “Daughter Gesture” (Intima, Spring 2023) honors a woman who is close to end of life, evoking her rich years of fertile work “kneading / knitting, hoeing” with hands that still remember. While we cannot know for certain that the relationship is actually between the poet and her mother, the speaker clearly has a loving, daughter-like relationship with the woman she is caring for. Her gesture of painting the woman’s fingernails “Hollyhock pink” captures the small, meaningful gifts we give to loved ones.
In the final lines, when the mother recognizes the similarity between their work-worn hands, Clarkson, a writer who after caring for her mother through a long illness re-careered as a Registered Nurse working in Home Health and Hospice, affirms the enduring connection between them.
Those small gifts are what I try to evoke at the end of “What Remains” (Intima, Spring 2023) as I grieve the loss of my mother. In my poem I wish to reassure my mother that, even if she did not have much materialistically to give us, her gestures of love brightening the start of each day were enough to sustain us throughout our lives. It pains me to think that she doubted the meaning of her life, especially so close to the end.
One of the beautiful things that poetry can do is to console us by celebrating the people we love when they pass away.
Joan Baranow is the author of six poetry collections, including Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague, winner of the 2021 Brick Road Poetry Book Contest. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, Forklift OH, Poetry East, JAMA and elsewhere. A VCCA fellow and member of the Community of Writers, she founded and teaches in the Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Dominican University of CA. With her husband Dr. David Watts, she produced the PBS documentary “Healing Words: Poetry & Medicine.” Her feature-length documentary, “The Time We Have,” presents an intimate portrait of a teenager facing terminal illness.