My Mothers Body
Read "My Mothers Body" by Marge Piercy, an intimate poem confronting a mother's aging and physical mortality, exploring the complicated bonds between mother and daughter, memory, inheritance, love, the female body, and the passage of time.
1.
The dark socket of the year
the pit, the cave where the sun lies down
and threatens never to rise,
when despair descends softly as the snow
covering all paths and choking roads:
then hawkfaced pain seized you
threw you so you fell with a sharp
cry, a knife tearing a bolt of silk.
My father heard the crash but paid
no mind, napping after lunch
yet fifteen hundred miles north
I heard and dropped a dish.
Your pain sunk talons in my skull
and crouched there cawing, heavy
as a great vessel filled with water,
oil or blood, till suddenly next day
the weight lifted and I knew your mind
had guttered out like the Chanukah
candles that burn so fast, weeping
veils of wax down the chanukiya.
Those candles were laid out,
friends invited, ingredients bought
for latkes and apple pancakes,
that holiday for liberation
and the winter solstice
when tops turn like little planets.
Shall you have all or nothing
take half or pass by untouched?
Nothing you got, Nun said the dreydl
as the room stopped spinning.
The angel folded you up like laundry
your body thin as an empty dress.
Your clothes were curtains
hanging on the window of what had
been your flesh and now was glass.
Outside in Florida shopping plazas
loudspeakers blared Christmas carols
and palm trees were decked with blinking
lights. Except by the tourist
hotels, the beaches were empty.
Pelicans with pregnant pouches
flapped overhead like pterodactyls.
In my mind I felt you die.
First the pain lifted and then
you flickered and went out.
2.
I walk through the rooms of memory.
Sometimes everything is shrouded in dropcloths,
every chair ghostly and muted.
Other times memory lights up from within
bustling scenes acted just the other side
of a scrim through which surely I could reach
my fingers tearing at the flimsy curtain
of time which is and isn't and will be
the stuff of which we're made and unmade.
In sleep the other night I met you, seventeen
your first nasty marriage just annulled,
thin from your abortion, clutching a book
against your cheek and trying to look
older, trying to took middle class,
trying for a job at Wanamaker's,
dressing for parties in cast off
stage costumes of your sisters. Your eyes
were hazy with dreams. You did not
notice me waving as you wandered
past and I saw your slip was showing.
You stood still while I fixed your clothes,
as if I were your mother. Remember me
combing your springy black hair, ringlets
that seemed metallic, glittering;
remember me dressing you, my seventy year
old mother who was my last dollbaby,
giving you too late what your youth had wanted.
3.
What is this mask of skin we wear,
what is this dress of flesh,
this coat of few colors and little hair?
This voluptuous seething heap of desires
and fears, squeaking mice turned up
in a steaming haystack with their babies?
This coat has been handed down, an heirloom
this coat of black hair and ample flesh,
this coat of pale slightly ruddy skin.
This set of hips and thighs, these buttocks
they provided cushioning for my grandmother
Hannah, for my mother Bert and for me
and we all sat on them in turn, those major
muscles on which we walk and walk and walk
over the earth in search of peace and plenty.
My mother is my mirror and I am hers.
What do we see? Our face grown young again,
our breasts grown firm, legs lean and elegant.
Our arms quivering with fat, eyes
set in the bark of wrinkles, hands puffy,
our belly seamed with childbearing,
Give me your dress that I might try it on.
Oh it will not fit you mother, you are too fat.
I will not fit you mother.
I will not be the bride you can dress,
the obedient dutiful daughter you would chew,
a dog's leather bone to sharpen your teeth.
You strike me sometimes just to hear the sound.
Loneliness turns your fingers into hooks
barbed and drawing blood with their caress.
My twin, my sister, my lost love,
I carry you in me like an embryo
as once you carried me.
4.
What is it we turn from, what is it we fear?
Did I truly think you could put me back inside?
Did I think I would fall into you as into a molten
furnace and be recast, that I would become you?
What did you fear in me, the child who wore
your hair, the woman who let that black hair
grow long as a banner of darkness, when you
a proper flapper wore yours cropped?
You pushed and you pulled on my rubbery
flesh, you kneaded me like a ball of dough.
Rise, rise, and then you pounded me flat.
Secretly the bones formed in the bread.
I became willful, private as a cat.
You never knew what alleys I had wandered.
You called me bad and I posed like a gutter
queen in a dress sewn of knives.
All I feared was being stuck in a box
with a lid. A good woman appeared to me
indistinguishable from a dead one
except that she worked all the time.
Your payday never came. Your dreams ran
with bright colors like Mexican cottons
that bled onto the drab sheets of the day
and would not bleach with scrubbing.
My dear, what you said was one thing
but what you sang was another, sweetly
subversive and dark as blackberries
and I became the daughter of your dream.
This body is your body, ashes now
and roses, but alive in my eyes, my breasts,
my throat, my thighs. You run in me
a tang of salt in the creek waters of my blood,
you sing in my mind like wine. What you
did not dare in your life you dare in mine.
My Mothers Body Summary and Analysis
Marjorie Piercy's poem follows the shock of a mother's collapse and then widens into an intimate meditation on inheritance, memory, and the uneasy closeness between mother and daughter. The opening section moves from the mother's sudden illness or stroke into the daughter's distant but immediate experience of it, showing how one body can feel another body's crisis across miles. Holiday images, domestic details, and the mother's vanishing presence make the moment both personal and ceremonial, as if ordinary life and ritual itself are being interrupted by mortality.
From there, the poem travels through memory in restless, shifting scenes: the mother as a younger woman, the daughter as child, the family line of women passing body, temperament, and pain from one generation to the next. Piercy explores the contradictions of loving someone who has also hurt, shaped, and resisted you. By the end, the mother becomes both lost and vividly internal, no longer only an external figure but a living force in the daughter's own voice, body, and imagination. The poem's deepest tension lies in this mixture of separation and merger: the daughter refuses to be absorbed, yet she cannot escape the fact that she is also made from her mother's life.
Tone in My Mothers Body
Piercy's tone is intimate, searching, and unsparing, shifting between grief, anger, tenderness, and rueful recognition. She does not sentimentalize the mother-daughter bond; instead, she faces its abrasions and its deep dependence at the same time. The mood for the reader is emotionally charged and unsettled, moving from the shock of illness into a reflective ache that never fully resolves. Even when the poem becomes tender, it keeps the atmosphere taut, as if love and damage are permanently braided together.
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Themes in My Mothers Body
- Mother-daughter inheritance - The poem traces how physical features, temperament, suffering, and desire move from mother to daughter, making inheritance feel embodied rather than merely genetic.
- Mortality and bodily fragility - The mother's collapse reveals the body as vulnerable, temporary, and subject to sudden failure, while the poem repeatedly returns to the fear of aging and disappearance.
- Memory as living presence - Memory is not treated as a neat recollection but as an active space where the mother appears at different ages, forcing the daughter to relive and reinterpret her.
- Separation and identification - The daughter resists being folded back into the mother's life, yet she also recognizes their profound resemblance, creating a tension between independence and identification.
- Female selfhood and constraint - The poem links womanhood to social pressure, marriage, work, appearance, and obedience, showing how women are shaped by expectations they may not fully accept.
- Love mixed with injury - The relationship between mother and daughter includes tenderness, resentment, fear, and violence, suggesting that family love can be inseparable from pain.
- Transformation and survival - The poem ultimately turns loss into creative continuity, imagining the mother's unrealized possibilities living on in the daughter's life and voice.
Literary Devices in My Mothers Body
- Extended metaphor - Piercy repeatedly compares the body to clothing, a vessel, a coat, or a dress, making identity seem both wearable and temporary.
- Simile - Vivid comparisons such as pain moving like weather or the mother going out like a candle sharpen the emotional intensity of loss.
- Symbolism - Holiday candles, laundry, curtains, and clothing all suggest passing time, vulnerability, and the thin boundary between inner life and outer form.
- Free verse - The unrhymed, flexible structure mirrors the poem's shifting movement through grief, memory, and reflection.
- Imagery - Piercy uses strong sensory details, from winter darkness to crowded rooms and family objects, to make memory feel tactile and immediate.
- Apostrophe and direct address - The poem speaks to the mother as a living presence, creating intimacy and emphasizing unresolved feeling.
- Repetition - Repeated references to the body, coat, dress, and mother/daughter roles reinforce the poem's central concern with resemblance and inheritance.
- Rhetorical questions - Questions about fear, identity, and transformation express emotional uncertainty and invite the reader into the poem's inward struggle.
Symbolism in My Mothers Body
- Chanukah candles - Their brief burning suggests the mother's life, the flickering of consciousness, and the fragility of human endurance.
- Dreydl - The spinning toy points to chance, limitation, and the feeling that life can suddenly stop and settle into loss.
- Dress/clothing - Clothing symbolizes the self as something inherited, worn, altered, and never fully fixed.
- Skin - Skin functions as a boundary between self and world, but also as a mask that cannot hide family resemblance.
- Hair - The shared black hair marks maternal lineage and the persistence of the mother within the daughter.
- Laudry/folding - The image of being folded up suggests death as quiet removal, but also the fragile handling of a life once full of shape and weight.
Historical Context of My Mothers Body
Marge Piercy writes in a late twentieth-century American feminist context that often reexamined family life, women's work, embodiment, and the limits placed on female identity. Her poetry frequently gives close attention to the social realities surrounding women while also treating the body as a site of memory, power, and vulnerability. In that broader tradition, this poem fits a period when many women writers were expanding lyric poetry to include domestic life, intergenerational conflict, and the complicated meanings of motherhood.
The poem also reflects a modern Jewish-American sensibility through its holiday imagery and attention to ritual objects, though it is grounded more in lived family experience than in formal religious meditation. Its blending of private grief with cultural symbols is characteristic of contemporary poetry that treats identity as layered: bodily, familial, and communal at once.
Poems Similar to My Mothers Body
- "One Art" - Elizabeth Bishop
- "Morning Song" - Sylvia Plath
- "Those Winter Sundays" - Robert Hayden
- "Daddy" - Sylvia Plath
- "Female" - Louise Bogan