A Poem for Mother's Day, 2026

Here's a photo that speaks to my New England roots, for sure!

I wrote this for one of my amazing "daughters-in-law" this morning. My family seems to put both work and love at the top of the list. I'm grateful!

 

This Pause

In another time, another country, we might know the calendar

with its weekly sabbath day within our very bones and breath:

the sweet halt of work, the pause to contemplate, to renew

acquaintance with old stories of grace and courage, accompanied

by music braided golden with emotion.

 

But we are grown children of immigrants, people who hold work

as salvation, strength, the sure thing to save us from the world’s

forceful fist. Our lists summon attention, effort, tasks and goals,

so the shimmer of sunlight at the window, rain’s rhythmic call,

reliable thump of the heart evades

 

our notice so often. Then, sister, let us reclaim this day: Let us

taste love with our coffee, savor peace with our pastry. Mothers

we are—noticing the time, the laundry, meals to plan, prepare,

all attached to the same clock that will call us back to work

when Monday circles toward us—

 

but this is the moment we choose for ourselves. We hold it

tenderly; we laugh at how absurd it is to “take time off” when

so much is waiting for our capable hands, our clever minds.

We hear the others waking up, know the only way to hold

joy and rest is with both hands.

 

Here is the Mother’s Day we didn’t plan, didn’t expect,

inner admission of how much we give … outer recognition in

a phone call, a kiss, a smile, someone’s thanks expressed.

Vital intention: We choose our lives. We sweeten our own

celebration. We sing.

 

BK

 

On the Final Day of National Poetry Month -- Here's a Poem (Out Loud!) from THRESHOLDS

It's #pocketpoem day -- so I'm glad to share a reading of "Everything Is All Right" from THRESHOLDS, my new book of poems exploring some of the transitions we experience. What are the Big Ones in your life? Wishing you strength and courage for the next one.

 

"Juggling Parenthood at Seventy" -- My Poem in New Feathers Anthology

There are many forms now of having a poem published, and some of them are online -- but New Feathers Anthology also produces a printed collection each year of some of its poems. I am very excited that "Juggling Parenthood at Seventy" is on page 133!

If you are a poetry nerd, you may recognize the form "underneath" this poem: It's "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop and begins, "The art of losing isn't hard to master." One of the techniques that the formidable poetry professor Ellen Bass teaches is taking such a poem and writing your own version, a sort of homage but also a set of training wheels. Since I love "One Art," I chose to work from its pattern.

Then, as you might pick up, I also was thinking of those "directions" for how to juggle. I tried once! I was hopeless. But I suspect that, like parenting, you can read tons of instructions but the reality will always be different, and you have to adapt and get used to it. I never gave the juggling enough of a chance ... but parenting, well, yes, I'm still doing that. Many of you will know exactly the feeling.

 

Juggling Parenthood at Seventy 

[published in New Feathers Anthology, August 2025]

 

The diagrams suggest it isn’t hard:

you start with all three balls, and toss the first

release the second, pass the third—it’s art—

then you believe you’re ready for the next.

 

I start the day with all the balls in hand

prepared to just confirm I’ve found the art

where I believe I’m ready for the next

demand for help from one of my grown sons.

 

Release my expectations, trust the art:

I set them free to fly, I gave them wings.

I ache each time they cry for help, grown sons

who stumble and who bleed, for love’s own sake.

 

I raised them well and saw them claim their wings,

each full of confidence and boundless hope—

convinced that love could raise them like an art.

I blame myself each time they crash and cry.

 

How can I feed fresh confidence and hope?

Release them, give them freedom, though it hurts—

when will they rise, instead of crash and cry?

The diagram suggests it isn’t hard.

 

 BK

 

Groundhog Day, and I'm Thinking About Woodchucks

The woodchucks, aka groundhogs, are still deep in hibernation in this part of Vermont, according to naturalist Mary Holland. So you get an early-light bluejay photo for the day!

I spent some time with Alfred Godin's guide, Wild Mammals of New England, to craft this poem.

    

The Woodchuck: For Groundhog Day

 

Clover. Alfalfa. Sprouts from the early garden, carrot,

peas, squash, corn, even cabbage although you might think

those could make a woodchuck’s farts stink, swirling

in a poorly ventilated burrow. Deep hibernators, fasting

through dark winters, they dream of asters, dahlias, hostas.

Their hungers pulse up from the deep midwinter snow

and desire is what the mother woodchuck knows, frantic

hunger, a poor preparation for a month of pregnancy: April

devours her body for fetal growth, until at last the babies

pass from the womb, fasten their desperate lips to nipples,

tiny and pink, fattening in five weeks to furry rompers. Diets

meant to deprive can’t connect to such needs; it is one thing

to spend months curled around some inner emptiness

(lost love, or radiated organs), when it can’t be helped. But oh,

what a feast the mama groundhog greets in June: grunting,

squeaking, sucking on succulent specialties. Suspecting,

in her wordless appreciation, that you planted this all

for her vegetarian vocalizing delight.

You Have to Be Willing to Strike the Match

Blame it on those little paper matchbooks, too soft, too small. Those first efforts when I was a child terrified me -- the idea that a flame would be held at the end of my fingers. And it seemed I could not get the paper match to take fire, in its clumsy travel along the rough lighting strip.

Wooden matches arrived as a huge relief in my life. I could get them to light without flinching much, just making my fingers scurry backward along the small stick as the flame took shape at its tip. Every since then, I've avoided matchbooks, and appreciated those cardboard boxes full of potential instead.

It's the middle of the Jewish Festival of Lights, Hanukkah, as I write this. I've just taken part in an online session called "Magnify the Light," hosted by Ritualwell, a Jewish collaborative; a rabbi in Israel gave a teaching about how powerful light is ("it just takes a little light to push back the darkness"), and half a dozen of poets -- including me -- read related work. Mine was one of my poems based in awareness of both my happy marriage and the absence of my beloved, as I'm now a widow. A widow who knows how fortunate she was, and is. 

Then, as the session ended, I heard from Persimmon Tree, a lush and abundant online publication that delights especially in the lives of women over 50. My poem "Where's the Tag?" is in the just-revealed issue, and it deliberately rides the traditions of both my Quaker mother and my Jewish father. I've added a dash of the distress I hear around me, as many people who are oppressed by short days struggle through December, aiming for the relief of the Solstice and longer hours of sunlight ahead. Here's the link, and here's a screenshot too: 

 

There, I've managed to light a match and then a candle in my own (rather dim) mountainside afternoon. I've said in other places this week that a candle can be both a candle of mourning and a festive custom, at one time. That's how it feels. 

I'm so grateful that I've learned how to light a match ... even if it still makes me flinch a little. 

 

Amelia Earhart and My Mother: Another Reason to Write Poems

(Tap the image to read the poem.)

There are scraps of paper piled at the far right corner of my desk, bits of poems emerging. I've learned to write down "something" when the notion or metaphor or string of words comes tapping.  The more important they are, the more quickly they seem to vanish if I don't write them down.

This poem, though, came via a different route. My mother died "too soon" at age 53, while I was pregnant with my second baby. I needed to grieve and mourn, but I was also afraid to cry too much or too hard -- I didn't want the baby to arrive early, from my own stress. So that was a hushed-down, tamped-down farewell from me, while my younger sister assigned to herself the tasks of steering our father into his own new life chapter.

In the years since, one of the frustrations (of course) has been the many questions I would have asked, if we'd had more time together as two generations of mothers. But I've also learned to question the notions I had about who my mother was. We don't show our adult selves in depth to our kids when they are too young to understand.

My mother, when she was 8 years old, experienced the death of her own mother, from breast cancer. I knew that. I didn't know until pretty recently that as a child, she'd been an outcast among her New England cousins -- Joanie, the girl whose mother died, and who was fat, too. And unskilled with other children. 

Another thing I knew: that she resented being told she must touch the cold dead hand of her mother's corpse in the casket. She said it robbed her of other, warmer, memories of her mother.

What I didn't realize until this poem began "appearing on paper" was how close the timing of Mom's mother's death was to the mysterious loss in flight of Amelia Earhart. As I put them together, I began, strangely, to understand more about my mother. 

Which, of course, also means I learned something about myself.

Much appreciation to New Feathers for including the poem in its newly released anthology. 

To Be a New England "Girl"

My mother, managing five children and the social commitments that went with my father's management job, rarely spent money on herself (if we don't count those cigarettes). But she indulged in two magazine subscriptions that meant the world to her: Yankee Magazine, and Down East, "The Magazine of Maine." When a copy of one of those arrived in the mail, she'd curl up in her armchair under the portrait of her four-greats grandmother, and reconnect with the New England self she'd left behind in 1950 when she married my dad and moved with him to that land of plentiful engineering jobs: New Jersey.

Each summer she'd craft lengthy lists of meal plans and clothing needed, and we'd all head to New England for family camping. Our visits to great-aunts and various sorts of cousins dwindled with time, as either they passed away or the chaos of a large family couldn't be welcomed. So my memories of "Auntie Mi" (my grandfather Palmer's sister) and her husband are very faint indeed. I recall a donkey and maybe a pony at their New Hampshire home. And one of the more distant cousins, also called Aunt out of respect for her age, made doughnuts in Vermont. I don't know which town, now.

My folks had a challenging marriage, but around 1980 Dad went to a "gestalt" psychological workshop in Florida and came home repentant, determined to start over. They put their house on the market, quickly accepted an offer, and were weeks away from moving to Mexico City, where Dad would manage a lighting factory in transition, when Mom dropped to the ground outside the nursing home where she worked, and in a shockingly short time, she died.

In between the fresh start and the devastating ending, Mom sold or gave away most of her family treasures that spoke of New England. "You kids aren't interested in the stuff," she said firmly.

I can't say for sure about my siblings, but I was already in Vermont, rebuilding the family connection to New England, parenting a toddler, and expecting a second child. By the time I knew what Mom was up to, she'd done it. 

Then three years later my home burned to the cellarhole, in one of those devastating Vermont winter fires where there's nothing left—except in this case me and my children, which of course meant the most important part survived and went forward. (Yes, this is part of why my novels often include a fire.)

Somehow, these many years later, I do have a few small items from Mom's New England life. That probably means my father held onto them and passed them to me after the house fire. Two of them, small and without family initials, remain tiny treasures to me ... and those are what I carried to the Concord Historical Society last year, when I suddenly needed cover images for my newest novel, THE BITTER AND THE SWEET (Winds of Freedom Book 3). Concord's Beth Quimby kindly opened the museum to me, so I could stage a few photographs.

This one didn't get chosen for the cover, but it includes the two small items that remind me of Mom's New England roots: a locket that now holds a bit of my late husband's hair in its specially made interior, and a tiny mirror, far smaller than the one that always rested on my mother's "dressing table" next to her rose-scented eau de toilette and her face powder.

Somehow it seems like I should look into getting my own subscriptions again to those two classic New England magazines that engaged my mother so deeply. The story keeps spiraling, though: My first published poem in a national magazine? Yes, it was in Yankee Magazine, in 1995 -- too late for Mom to see it, but confirming for me anyway that I was becoming the New England "girl" she had always been at heart.

 

A Little Kanell History: From Russia, With Love

I spent a while working on my husband Dave's side of the family tree today. It's almost five years now since Dave's death, and I'm rusty on details, so it took half an hour of document diving to confirm what I thought I remembered: that Dave's grandfather Joe Kanell had been a grocer in New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1930s. I didn't want to accidentally pass along a mistaken detail ... and I had a poem in mind.

This photo of Joe Kanell, at age 47, shows him on board a ship in 1935, circling the globe, going to see his relatives in Vilna, also called Vilnius. The city was part of Lithuania, which at the time was governed by Russia -- when Joe immigrated to the United States in 1905 he declared himself "Russian," and later Census documents show that both Joe and his wife Yetta considered themselves to have been Russian before they became American. They described their parents as Russian, too.

In addition to being Russian, they were Jews, and knew the risk of pogroms, organized massacres that targeted people who identified with this religion. Yet in 1935, when Joe came from America to visit the rest of the family, they must have felt "safe enough," because none of them kept Joe company on his return to New Haven. The photo here shows Joe on his way to Vilna, Dave wrote.

In 1941, German forces occupied Vilna and liquidated -- that is, murdered -- its Jewish population. Imagine murdering a quarter of a city ... despite fierce resistance from the Jews of Vilna, that's what took place. (Read more here.)

When I met Dave in 2001, his grandfather was long gone -- died in 1969 -- and in Dave's mind, just a few Kanells were slaughtered in Vilna during the Second World War. A few years after we married, one of his cousins from outside New Haven, someone he hadn't known well, showed him a photo taken in Vilna of grandfather Joe and the Kanell family there: more than 30 people. Dave's concept of what had happened needed to be completely shifted, and I'm not sure he ever stopped reeling at the new knowledge of how many of his family had been killed.

So here is a poem for Joe and his family. I hope I have most of the pertinent details right. And I hope this wondering is of use to others along the way.

 

Unasked Questions

 

He leans on the ship railing, white collar buttoned,

tie and a cardigan, gives a wide smile—

no clue now to who took the picture, and Joe,

forty-seven then, gone such a while.

 

Nine decades later, wondering who

watched his grocery— wife Yetta, still well?

What did it cost to sail around the world?

The ship fare, the store losses—no way to tell.

 

But this is the story passed down for years:

His family lived in a Russian city

and he tried to persuade them to leave, to come

to America’s freedoms—alas, what a pity

 

that nobody wanted to follow him back.

For decades we thought there were two or three lost

then saw an old photo of Joe and the crowd

who vanished soon after, and found out the cost:

 

Two dozen or more of the Russian Kanells

were gone in a decade of war and disaster.

How did he bear it? How did he go on?

Yet we know he delighted in grandchildren after—

 

tossing a baseball, applauding their skills,

launching them upward, helping them grow.

We who are wondering how we’ll survive

try to live with our losses, like grandfather Joe.

[What Dave wrote when he posted the photo on his Facebook feed:

This post is in honor of my Grandfather Joseph Kanell (July 4, 1888 to Oct 18, 1969) who chose his birthday to be on July 4th because the United States was a land of opportunity & freedoms. From Vilna, Lithuania to New York City & then New Haven, Ct area. Have a great 4th today. I should also note that my grandmother Kanell also chose the 4th of July for her birthday. My grandparents always had the American Flag flying at every holiday.
This is a photograph of my grandfather aboard a ship on the way to visit his relatives in Vilna, Lithuania in 1935. This was the last time that he had any contact with his family from the Vilna area and in all probability they all perished in the Holocaust.]

Loving November

Center, my grandfather; I'm standing behind my youngest brothers., at the airport.

After a dingy, cloudy final week of October, November has launched here with bright skies and gusts of snowflakes. It's a season full of energy and daring (at least on the best days), and I'm up for it.

My grandfather Ernest's birthday was November 4, and when I was small, birthday phone calls across the Atlantic were costly and had to be booked in advance with an overseas operator. My grandfather sympathized with my parents' tight finances and would place the call from his end. Mom and Dad only needed to stay home and receive his call.

They reminded each other of the date using a British rhyme about Guy Fawkes Day, when bonfires in England declare vengeance on a long-ago traitor. The rhyme says, "Remember, remember, the fifth of November!" (That was the date of Fawkes's treasonous Gunpowder Plot back in 1605.) Ernest's birthday would be the "other date," the fourth.

One November, my folks recited the poem wrong, accidentally saying "remember the fourth of November" instead -- and assuring each other that Ernest's birthday phone call would thus take place on the fifth. So they cheerfully went out to a local hamburger diner on the fourth, and felt terribly embarrassed to miss my grandfather's important phone call after all.

That makes it easy for me to recall the right date now! 

My grandfather Ernest's dual citizenship and cultured awareness enabled him to leave Germany safely before Hitler's "Final Solution" took form. In these days of rising anti-Semitism, it's good to reflect that my father's parents found sufficient haven in England, although I know now that Fascism in London at that time still meant a level of discomfort and fear.

Lucky me: Although I didn't understand my grandfather's life, and I didn't wake up to the questions I could have asked until way too late, I did very much feel his love and support. Now I imagine some conversations we might have had, and they intrigue me.

Cigar Ash on His Tie

 

Nothing pretty about him at seventy: massive hands,

lower lip drooping and deep, reddened, quiet eyes

watching my efforts. Ernst. Grandfather to nine

 

smaller family than his own father’s—yet none of us

starving in a brutal camp, or fleeing to South America

not even exiled to Australia (great-uncle Alfred). We

 

could fit within a single room. Yet Ernst overflowed.

Say “Ernest” in England, banker, explorer, eager lover

of strong women: Some people walk away. Refuse.

 

With long strides he walked toward. What I seize

(years later) must mesh with my early observations, white

cigar ash on his tie, and on his car dashboard too, thick

 

soft, scented, no relation to ashes of war. Symphonies,

portraits, books, the riches of late peace. His early winter

promised French cafés, Dutch museums: In November winds

 

I hear his smoker’s cough, his hawk-fierce whistle, and

welcome my grandfather’s haunting.

 

 

 

 

 

Poem Published Today at Written Tales: STORM SURGE

 

Here's the link to the dramatic presentation at Written Tales: click here.

Storm Surge [published on Written Tales 5-30-23]

by Beth Kanell

 

First comes the wind, and then torrential rain—

there was no “eye” of peace, no silent space

but driven loss (one death) and pounding pain.

 

Why should I think I’d heal back, whole again

when half my hopes were his, his smile, his face,

gone with the roaring wind, the wrenching rain

 

and now these flooded fields that cannot drain.

My friend said, “Get a dog, expect new grace!”

But in her dark eyes, loss; trust pounds like pain.

 

He loved me as I am. That love’s a chain,

my anchor in this storm-soaked, battered place.

His life’s blown past like wind, like salted rain.

 

When healing comes, it’s tentative and plain,

a tender scar, a tentative new base—

as if a second life could lurch from pain!

 

Adopt the dog, and bonding close again

turns out to hold a storm surge that will race

and flood: Such wind may scream, such chilled rain:

This dog insists on love. Now comes more pain.