Whipping

Cord or twine used to bind 
or cover a rope, keep the ends
from fraying. To begin, 

place a hand 
on your daughter’s shoulders.
Tell her fifth grade is 
a bloodletting.

Show her your own path
of hard turns taken
before you were hauled taut
and loosed into motherhood.

Say, this knot 
is a folded note. 
This knot is a map

back to me. Lay out a rope.
Tell her to gather each end.
Say stitch them tight
or burn them down.

Copyright © 2022 by K. D. Harryman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 12, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I’m interested in the emotional fortitude and the trauma parents pass down to children, and I think often about ancestors and their reserve of knowledge and experience that we can draw from. This poem originated with a line from The Ashley Book of Knots, a beautiful encyclopedia of knots written in the 1940s. I had been working for some time with the metaphor of tying and untying knots and being female, the ways in which women are manipulated, how we contort ourselves, make ourselves small, and how it takes concentration and effort to both live within that smallness and to undo it.”
—K. D. Harryman