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.