Discussion Question

Keillor, Garrison. Good Poems for Hard Times. /ISBN: 9780143037675

For My Daughter in Reply to a Question

David Ignatow

We’re not going to die,

We’ll find a way.

We’ll breathe deeply

And eat carefully.

We’ll think always on life.

There’ll be no fading for you or for me.

We’ll be first

And we’ll not laugh at ourselves ever

And your children will be my grandchildren.

Nothing will have changed.

except by addition.

There’ll never be another as you

and never another as I.

No one ever will confused you

nor confused me with another.

We will not be forgotten and passed over

And buried under the births and deaths to come. Pg.13

For a Five-Year- Old

By Fleur Adcock

A snail is climbing up the window-sill

into your room, after a night of rain.

You call me in to see, and I explain

that it would be unkind to leave it there:

It might crawl to the floor; we must take care

that no one squashes it. You understand, and carry it outside, with careful hand,

to eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:

your gentleness is moulded still by words

from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,

from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed

your closest relatives, and who purveyed

the harshest kind of truth to many another.

But that is how things are: I am your mother,

and we are kind to snails. Pg.12