From the book "Essential Love":

So Now by Carol Wade Lundberg

There is to be
another body
flowing from the body
that once curled
like a shell
in my inland sea.

How strange
this unfolding outward
like the whorls
of planets
into bright rings
of life.

When a wave
separates herself
from the body
of her mother
crests and disappears
into another
constellation

does the sea mourn
as she rejoices?
Imperceptibly
her child has been flowing
toward an inevitable
transformation.

Each birth reminds
us that the tides
have shifted.
It is not
a daughter's
birth that separates

her from her mother
but the moment
she releases her
own child
to the world.

And another, "Essential Love"

Firstborn Daughter Leaving Home by Mariah Hegarty

Your patchwork baby quilt hangs on the wall
pinned up with tacks, it circumference
too small now to warm your dreams.
An entire history woven in this fabric,
three quarters of a year's patience
waiting for flesh stitching itself
invisibly, cell by cell.

I see myself then, as I knelt, rounded
belly pressing against my thighs.
I matched couples of calico as seriously
as a child playing Old Maid. Each
square paired with its mate -

the peacock ground in this swatch
harmonizing with the red wearing
roses of the same hue. Six blocks
wide, seven long, bordered in shades
of faded denim - hand-pieced. The tracks
of stitches mince in even lines,
connecting the rows. I never doubted

I could sew perfection into the seams
of your life. Now I sit on the floor
of your room in the last of the day's
light and examine my creation. Quilting
binds the top and bottom to the warmth
in the center; I pulled those threads
taut as my unripe cervix,

dividing the squares into segments,
a pie cut into eight neat slices. Now
gaps have appeared in the perpendicular
where straight-edged lines snapped
under the tension-it's give that lends
strength in the end. From across the room
my mistake is obvious. A larger order

is completely absent, lights and darks
juxtaposed at random in no particular
pattern. That row there has all reds
 and blues of the same intensity -
maroon flush with navy, alongside
cobalt, next to wine. Unnoticeable
up close, from here the colors blend
in an unbroken strip. So intent, at twenty
on the details, I never stepped back
 to see the whole. All these years later
I must remind myself,
it covered you just the same.

Another poem from "Essential Love":

The Knowing by Sue Ellen Thompson

The night before the final exam,
I stand in her doorway, my arms filled
with laundry still taut from the line.
High school is almost over, everything
littering her room is broken or ending:
the cupped stubs of candles,
the wilted root-hairs of a cactus
spilled on the sill in a scattering of sand;
the confetti that's left when notes are torn
from their bindings speckling the carpet
like so many used-up stars.
She sits in a cross-legged slump on the floor,
her baseball cap pulled down low
and her Baudelaire propped open
with a shoe. If she needs
my help, she's not asking. When she

was in seventh grade, I bought her
Les Chateaux de France at a bookstall in Paris.
Night after night we sat propped in her bed,
one of us reading until she came
to an unfamiliar word and the other
looking it up in the old blue Larousse. By the end
of that winter we knew the word for corbel
and truss, portcullis and finial
and crenelation. Between us we had
all the knowledge we needed to live in a world
whose walls contained everything
worth desiring. I lay the clothes

in a fragrant heap at her feet. Without looking up,
she aims the remote at her stereo, clicks,
and a chorus of angry voices erupts
all around us. When I was her age,
I would study hard up until bedtime,
then close the book, knowing
there was a point beyond which the facts
could not take me. So later that evening,
when her light goes out, and I turn out mine,
together we enter that time when all
we can know of each other is already
inside us, and who can conceive
a word for what lies ahead?

For Meg, Leaving Home  by Nettie Gillespie

Lights on everywhere, except where I am sitting
Writing this first letter since you left,
Knowing that what I write, I will not send -
That one comes later, full of cheerful news;
This is the one I have to write to me.

Once you were all promise, flower in the bud,
Sitting like Buddha on your yellow rug,
Catching the sun's motes with your fingers,
Your thoughts mysterious, wordless; and I felt
Nothing could come between you and the light.

But now I know first child has more to break
Than barriers of blood and bone; the soul's old pain,
The dark confusions of the blood, remain;
And all that karmic legacy broods still
Over the sunrise of your going forth.

Today I cleared your room of those old treasures
You could not bear to put away yourself;
Flotsam of empty bottles, unburned candles,
Paper flowers faded from the sun,
Buckles, yellow stockings, birthday cards;

And when I had finished the room stood stripped of your presence
Except for one orange flower and a Van Gogh print;
I felt like a nurse with an antispetic bottle
Tidying up after death, removing all traces,
Putting what's left behind in boxes;

And my throat was thick with the things I could never say,
Or even if I had, you could not have listened to;
And you are sent out on that same exhausting journey
Through wrong choices, false love. Yet for love's sake
I hurl you into the universe, and pray.

Mothers and Daughters  by Maude Meehan

There is a cord between us
not yet cut
On it we move
like tightrope walkers
novices
uncertain of the net
Take tentative steps
across the gulf
toward one another
Careful
not wishing to turn back
Hopeful
that keeping balance
we can meet
can then embrace
and pass each other
as we must

UNNESTING by Mary Lee McNeal

With indelible ink
 I write the name I gave you
 on each towel and sheet
 before I fold and place them
 in this trunk -
                  as if I could mark you
 any longer as mine!
                 as if we both didn't know
 you're a woman now, bound
                to name yourself: separate

I am remembering
the days spent washing, folding
tiny nightgowns and blankets,
scrubbing the places you'd lie,
trying to imagine you,
               a stranger about to burst
               from my own belly,
 grateful to find a name for
 unfamiliar domesticity: nesting instinct

Now, eighteen years later
I'm unable to name
these strangely soothing
preparations to send you away.
What to call this
pulling apart of the nest?
                     this plucking out
of the feathers and sticks
which have bound us?

This has no name, my
daughter, this instinct
                    to help you leave,
this terrible urge to
                    push you out.

 Some poetry from a collection called "Essential Love" poems about mothers and fathers, daughters and sons                  

                       GIRLS
          By MaryLee McNeal

The young girls play in the park
making a house of dry grass.
Inside they place a straw queen
they name "Odd Audrey."
Their laughter cuts through
the blue day.

Buds of breasts begin
under the shirt of one,
but my daughter and the others
are flat still, with childhood.
They are content with their
house, their game
of rolling down the grassy hill.

Soon they will all lose this game,
their voices will be muted,
their bodies become objects
for the world,
their beauty lost to themselves,
the possibilities of their new games
distant and dangerous.

I want to lock them
in their house with Odd Audrey,
all of them still honoring
their honest odd selves.
I dread that blood road
They must travel,
I've already gone down.