Mother's Day Poem: "Summer Idyll"

In the previous post displayed yesterday at “One Poet’s Notes” I offered a poem from Tidal Air, “Grace Notes,” a piece that I had written to celebrate the birth of my son. I provided it as an example of the reactions a parent might have when watching the tentative initial movements of a newborn, and I was prompted to share the poetry after learning about the arrival Friday afternoon of twins for my brother and sister-in-law. Indeed, I imagined the joy they must have been experiencing as they gazed for the first time at the two new members of their family, perhaps while both were stirring from sleep in the bassinets.

As I explained yesterday, “Grace Notes” appeared as the opening poem in Tidal Air, and it began an extended sequence of poems filling the first half of the book. Today, in honor of Mother’s Day, I present “Summer Idyll,” which was positioned as the second piece in that sequence of poems at the opening of Tidal Air. This poem is a work that had been inspired by my wife and son soon after his birth.

SUMMER IDYLL

She is still there, sitting in the irregular shadow
. . . . . of a willow tree, holding a slumbering child

some have come to know as her first-born, a son.
. . . . . Strollers pass this woman bent over her bundle

beneath low-sagging limbs; the solitary tree
. . . . . looming beyond vast fields burned brown

by summer sun. Although the warm August
. . . . . winds sifting through the leaves above do not

disturb the two figures below, a few cumulus
. . . . . clouds have begun to drift by, now shifting in

from the south. Their dark, ragged edges graze
. . . . . a distant skyline of spruce and Douglas fir.

Underneath these massive mounds which
. . . . . appear to brush lightly the far-off hills,

offering brief basins of shade to the valleys
. . . . . they cross, momentary relief from midday

heat seems noticed no more than noonday
. . . . . light has been, as mother and child both

continue in their consummate bliss to ignore
. . . . . the brilliant world that whirls around them.


—Edward Byrne