When your son abandons the lawnmower for the second time in as many days

We all want to leave this widening night,

            this barking at the thing we can’t see.

No one walks through their story un-stung.

            This yard, this life, like a book of changes,

the moment buzzing by like a prophecy,

            your body a constellation of pain.

We spend our time stumbling through the white fog,

            searching the doctrine of our own breath

when all we need do is crawl deep inside 

            the silence that comes after and face

the teeming hole in the ground, the wasp’s nest, 

            that cousin of the eyelessness of space.  

Do not fear the ache and swell my sweet boy.

            It’s easy to hate what we’re given.

Copyright © 2021 by Peter Grandbois. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 30, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“The genesis of the poem is pretty simple. My teenage son ran over a yellow jacket nest and ran inside swarmed by wasps. He suffered several stings. I destroyed the wasp nest and promised him that something like that would never happen again. The next day, he tried to finish the job of mowing the lawn and hit yet another yellow jacket nest, suffering several more stings. The poem is my attempt to grapple both with our inability to avoid pain and the parent’s dilemma in not being able to protect our children from that pain. Anger and withdrawal are natural reactions, but the poem posits another, perhaps more hopeful, answer.”
—Peter Grandbois