Parenting: What It Takes
Parenting is an uneasy task. In a world dominated by the emerging popularity of being single, having children out of wedlock and having to raise children after being divorce, parenting, in terms of the commitment of the man and his spouse is growing thin, each and every passing day.
Parenting is the chosen task taken up by a man, woman or both to handle the responsibility of appropriately raising children (biological or adoptive) in ways that conform to their given standards and principles with the aim of rearing them to become productive to society. It takes maturity on the
part of the man, woman or both to painstakingly and assiduously nurture children. Parenting involves a great deal of sacrifices and commitments by either party to ensure their children gets the attention, love, care and basic needs met.
What makes parenting, particularly by both parties, work is when the man and his spouse have chosen to value trust and communication in the things they do which are connected to their children. The understanding of each other's demeanor will go a long way in administering the attention their
children would get. For instance, a wayward woman will not be able to understand what it means when raising a child whose demeanor is rather hostile. A man who is not always around will not understand what it means for his spouse to sit down with their child to give utmost attention.
In a world where one would have to spend longer hours at work to make ends meet, parenting becomes a difficult task as the time or attention for children would hardly be available. Each and every passing day, the work world is embraced by more attention to machines, keeping at bay what parents need to do at home. Hence, it would take wisdom to actually strike a feasible balance between meeting up with working
demands and attending to matters of the home, particularly the mental upkeep of children. Communication and trust between two parents would have to be necessary for such balance to be created. In other words, ensuring each other’s responsibility towards the upkeep of their children as they are faced with demands at work would have to be a priority.
Parenting takes discipline to cultivate. It is very hard trying to
raise children with different traits and peculiar abilities. It would take extra effort on the part of the woman parent to always ensure that her disabled son does not feel rejected by or isolated from his peers. It would take a wise father to make sure all that are required to pay up his daughter's tuition fees and other related academic expenditures are met, despite having to pay debts incurred.
In a time where divorce, separation and single parenting prevails, the involvement of either the woman or man in fostering a healthy physical, mental and spiritual growth of his or her children becomes a huge challenge as matters concerning their personal health comes to focus due to stress encountered in the place of work.
True parenting takes the involvement of a man and his spouse and the choice to painstakingly and wisely see to the upbringing of their children through communication and trust in faith.
How To Start
I cannot start
without the dagger pain of a wooden splinter
cored deep and burrowing in the dark.
Bearded dog, limping Cuckoo wasp, the painted
canvases are tumbling dominoes
but I cannot start.
Once I wandered onto property that was not mine
and an old man came screaming up
on a swastika-stamped ATV and the damp moss
spat his beliefs in my eyes, and I was startled
by a mind that was not mine.
I could start then.
Her Body
She lifts her body with her body,
moves her body with her body, sits down
on a hard mahogany chair that holds her body
while she tends to her body, as it is a creature
that needs be tended. Cutting lentils
and cooking rice to sustain her body,
boiling water, infusing safflower
that will quench her body, her body
moving her fingers (a part of her body)
with fine finesse and ease. She thinks
nothing of this marvelousness
that is her body; her body
is a sack which carries her brain around
which is also a part of her body,
wishes she could be without it, contemplates
the necessity of fingernails and earlobes.
She navigates the stairs with her body
that was built by bodies
with the help of machines and tools
that were imagined and designed by bodies,
who sweated, labored, debated
and shaped them alive like art. She enters
with her body, exits with her body,
works with her body, talks
with her body, embraces with her body,
treats it like a garden bush,
keeping it satisfied in its self-containing self.
Her body is the ultimate instrument,
that could even make other bodies
if she so chose; in her womb,
with her body, and the brief assistance
of another body, she can form a being.
(She does not consider much
how this is an attribute of gods.)
She lifts her body to reach the books
on the top shelf, lies her body with her body
onto her bed that cradles her body,
an idea her body came up with
to reconfigure itself. And so
she dreams in her body,
sees orbs and faces and feels pine needles
and loses time and place and law.
Her body is a distant echo; for seven hours
she is more than her body and she likes this,
she thinks this is a miraculous feat.
When she wakes she is a body again.
She rouses her body, walks her body
to the kitchen with her body,
to the kettle with her body, her body
a marvel, to be sure, her body
a majesty of cells and electrical impulses
and movements of bone and lore.
She counts her dollars, heads
to the grocery store, buys a vegetable body,
smells it, feels its leathery hide, wonders
if a potato is aware it has a body,
she walks alone the five city blocks
back home, considering only
the consciousness of the sky.
Dead Finches
They say the bird is a messenger.
Two finches die in a heatwave but who’s around?
The folding and unfolding skies twiddle
with my heart-ends, my valves summer yellow,
chambers blanketed in snow. Again
a lover sends down the rains, but all I get
are rasping gulls with shrieks that puncture sleeps
as musky as cow pastures, as heavy as gold.
My messengers are in procession down the nave
of a church with no one but straw dolls in the pews.
Birds die everyday. I’ve broken bottles
with more than liquid in them. In mourning
there’s a need for a story (even if cruel).
Words unwritten are words unused.
The Play
The curtain rises, and there are faux-animals
human beings dressed in gowns
of lions, elk, cicadas, foxes, toucans
whales on their stomachs moaning upon the floor
so they sway, declare they are grass blades
heaped together, a meadow, a symphony
and yes, they are singing
singing with not just their mouths dressed
as maws and bills and proboscises but with their eyes
their arms, their bellies, their hands
they are trying to tell the story
the story of what it means
to be on an oblate ball of clay alone
orbiting its way through unrelenting space
and what it means, they tell, of how they all lean
together upon one another's shoulders
how they have sex with each other
eat each other
die and will head
into the same soily, cool bed
how they fear and love each other
and are pulled
arrested
driven by yearnings and cravings
to rub against, break things open
watch it, see it, touch it, all of it, grow, change
it all so painful, heavenly, astronomical
so they sing, of when they first realized
that they could not leave, that they, all as one
existed on an island, and if it goes
they all go, gulped by an exhalation of energy
dark matter and quantum particles
and together they begin to act out the end
by suddenly spinning like tops
they fall into and over each other, calling out
hollering roars and coos and clicks and baas
and gasps and cries that are human
and taking off their pelts, as humans
they collapse, impact, all as one, to the stage
except the whales, they merely roll onto their backs
and reach their flippers up toward
the lights shining above, and this theater
all the way to the back rows and utmost rafters
is silent as a tomb.
Shake
All things rattle to your touch.
You are an earthquake, with feelers for the moon.
Monsignori pray for you. Playwrights scratch out
the tremor that takes place inside your pen;
little things make you quiver,
like lost daughters, dead pets, gone friends.
As the mother hen you bear the egg.
As the second youngest of the Babe and the Pop
your shoulders shake from all the wave of
Seven Sibling Wonders who came.
You stick to shampoo, like glue,
and all the windows leak whispers to you.
You pluck a cigarette, and shiver in the drag.
As the grass whipping, you smile.
The dandelions sprout in droves
and you reach to uproot—but you don’t.
Mama, you get me to commit
the genocide.
Lime Kiln
Around his steeple, a neckerchief
embroidered with the lie his father gave.
So, around the point, the strong gulls live,
songs like raking nails to the ear.
Dry myrtle, in the hand, spittle
aside the mouth, we forge course
through the arching buttresses of stars.
He knows the hammer. He knows the bouts.
What swings lays waste to things unmoving.
I reject his common beliefs, his white napkin
that dabs away the gore of his stinging words.
Daytime the chronometer, daytime the stick
measuring the waves at Lime Kiln.
My hands cross the hours. My hands
silt smeared and boney old. He harbors
his clean justice, his pure head
in the flailing wings of birds thriving.
I see the dead ones, on the stones.
Full of ivory threads and matted plumes.
Renwick Berchild is half literary critic, half poet. She is lead editor of Green Lion Journal and writes at Nothing in Particular Book Review. Her poems have appeared in Porridge Mag,Headline Press, Whimperbang, Free Verse Revolution, Vita Brevis, Streetcake, and other e-zines, anthologies, and journals. She was born and raised on the angry shores of Lake Superior, and now lives in a micro-apartment in Seattle, WA. Find more of her work at www.renwickberchild.com
The Loan
By Steven Hill
It comes back to me in pieces,
in reflective bites over breakfast cereal—
the smile of moonlit miles,
walks under freckles of stars
two bodies, folded in a hammock,
childish words for you, carved in a tree
so close, the summer grass as we crawled.
And we rubbed, I and thou,
cheek to cheek,
hair to hair,
cheek hairs brushed by dew,
drizzle like feather clouds
like memories of my baby blanket,
star-crossed patterns peering
at each other through our
windows—
what marvelous shelters,
you and I,
what a lighthouse,
what a beacon glowed within you and
beamed out at me
through your windows.
And then—suddenly—it was all gone. Poof!
This life is on loan, it turns out.
What we thought was ours belongs somewhere else,
drifted back home
leaving a pile of bones and
scattered remains, ashes, chalky petroglyphs
shards of pottery
and a long trail of relations like ribbons
to carry on with what they too have borrowed.
Dandelion’s time had come to leave upon the wind,
not returning when spring
pushed up through the soil again.
We thought we would all live on the same block forever,
a shady cul-de-sac with
a box elder swaying over the creek,
the water feigning timelessness,
tree rings to infinity.
But a storm got the elder, the years dried the creek,
your kiss became a memory
our conversation a hushed prayer,
the doctor’s words a trace
whispering through the moonlit lace,
the last light I saw reflected in your graying eyes
showed the telephone disconnected,
the boisterous neighborhood grown silent
bat and ball, lifeless in the on-deck
a field no longer sown,
the grandfather clock chiming
over a hearth gone cold.
Everything in its own way announces the final curtain,
we trowel a foundation,
mark ourselves with a lifetime of endeavor
and then we are called to relinquish the monument;
no, it relinquishes us
Dull chatter in the background, announcing itself at the door,
with a rap and a rude harrumph,
waistcoat fastidious on the coach driver,
ah yes, the coach awaits, the door creaks open,
passage for one.
It’s a marathon and then
nothing,
silhouette instead of stone,
the universal groan,
pace yourself, passage for one,
you won’t be takin’ it with you,
this life is on loan.
Consciousness is Self Evident.
To Ask for Proof grants the Disproof
by the Axiom of Requiring it.
It's a journey that every Question
Aborts the Answer
so a walk home resumes.
The industry, The Art
is how to define Boundaries
to hold Pleasure as
an enduring form.
So If You Like it,
the process can come
from non-form
through form
to non-form
Or mid-stand
where comfort
holds the sensitivity
to ongoing Beauty.
Vibrant Joy Sure by feeling
upon natural ongrowing
Boundaries that fall to
unrestrained pleasure.
Set Heart's desires
as bounding focus
drawn a party to
Gifts rising upon the moment,
Evidently.
Mimesis
upon a saint’s grave lies a litany of prayer
dissolving into a pound of soil. what scrapes
from a faithful pilgrim with white bird in his
chest & white beards on his jaws than juicy
flesh, to show him dead? i’ve walked into
dreams to understand what desertion means:
perhaps, is it the frozen lake a wild hog melts
into like a piece of his culture he carries on his
nose? who says we don’t admire God, we do?
Or perhaps, we admire the flower that breathes
behind His throne, too. you see? Even the angels
have a garden of light they pluck breath from,
like snowballs, as snow men. what silences a
graveyard isn’t the presence of dead bodies but
the absence of humans’ scent. i wonder if tearing
a spiderweb means ruining his home and casting
its bangles out into the cold, like a refugee, like
how my mother sheds off the skin of her local
color & nail a husk that reeks of modernism on
her ears. do these children know that local drums
have the voices they weave into our ears? & do re
mi aren’t just notes but a series of hushed voices
waiting to be touched by hands cold and frozen
interpretation. i don’t remember if my lineage pane-
gyrics starts with my father’s name or his father’s,
or his father’s father yet i do know, this language is
nested into the water that drizzles beneath my legs.
iyawo n lota (the bridesmaid is grinding pepper)
ileke n saso (the beads on her waist her grumbling)
ileke ma saso mo (beads, grumble no more)
je ki iyawo lota (let the bride grind pepper.)
i wonder if this song ever fall from mother’s tongue
like mockingbirds fall into the palm of their deaths.
Sunday T. Saheed, the author of Rewrite the Stars, is a 17-year-old Nigerian writer, and a Hilltop Creative Arts Foundation member. He was the 1st runner-up for the Nigerian Prize for Teen Authors, 2021. His works have appeared or are forthcoming on Rough Cut Press, Brittle Paper, The Comstock Review, Salamander Ink, Aster Lit, The Lumiere Review, Poemify, Afrocritik, My Woven Poetry, Arts Lounge, SprinNG, Rigorous mag, Kissing Dynamite, Beatnik Cowboy, Trouvaille Review, Augment Review, Spirited Muse Press, Gyroscope, Giallo Lit, Open Skies Quarterly, Kalahari, Cajun Mutt, Open Leaf Press Review, Re Side, de Curated and others. He is also an asst. editor for The Nigeria Review (TNR). He was shortlisted for the Wole Soyinka International Cultural Exchange, 2018, The New Man Gospel Poetry Contest and BKPW Poetry Contest, 2022. He can be read on linkfly.to/sundaysaheed or reached on Instagram @poetsundaysaheed
Some geographies:
Batangas
Only an exceptional lawyer,
with a strong resemblance
to motor Jacksonian epilepsy
& a somewhat heavier bass-
line trailing behind them, can
perform a confident victory lap
without slamming the putter
back into the bag & stewing on
their flight back from Manila.
Gabès
Candy may be hard
to find in the fast-
food franchises built
by the former colonial
government in the
airport terminal, but,
thanks to the U.S.
military intelligence
supplying them in
an electronic format,
pretzels are plentiful.
Palembang
Scotch whisky — or was
it Irish? Or both? — is
said to be enhanced by
distilling it over burning
peat. Here peatland fire
is given as a reason why
not to visit the city. Not
always so. Yijing, a 7th-
century Chinese monk, came
back from a six month stay
excited by the plethora of
electronic billboards, & how
they scraped the sky. Little
heard from him after that.
Rumor has it the Dutch East
India Company obtained
his silence by promising him
the royalties from any future
use of that sky-scraping word
along with a speaking part in the
upcoming Blade Runner movie.
Balikpapan
There was a pig tied up in
a corner. A toddler was tied
up on several pieces of board
in a state of lying. How dare
they say there was no evidence
of white supremacy? My brain
keeps running a marathon. The
frontal lobes eventually get
overloaded. We can't easily
make these problems go
away. Instead of dinner
with a big group we have
Zoom & cookies. It is so tiring.
Jezqazǵan
A quick snack is all the guide-
books say you can find here.
They suggest you go some-
where else, to a nearby city
perhaps, if you're looking for
memorable moments. Maybe
that's why the Soyuz rocket
of expedition 49 landed near-
by, to relax "in a remote region
in Kazakhstan" after the hustle
& bustle of space. It was my
75th birthday. If I'd known they
were going to be around, I
would have invited them along.
Cork
Only infections
acquired after surgery
can dominate the
men's 400m hurdles
& remove all un-
necessary programs
in the expansive &
expanding field
of Irish studies.
Bayanbulag
It may be tucked away in
a dark graffiti-covered alley
but you can often find out
what yurts are currently
on the market or what the
relationship is between
nutritional status & motor
development by following
the many conversations on
religion & culture that occur
in the manicured gardens of
the Divine Word University.
JURISPRUDENCE: COLLATERAL DAMAGE
A well-regulated militia…
The goal is clear: no standing army here
in this new country. None. If there is need,
just fill the ranks with farmers, merchants, men
bringing their own muskets. Then, disband
when battle’s won. At least, that was the plan.
Today’s lawmakers make no laws to hold back
trigger-fingers itching to be free.
A teen in Texas purchases two rifles,
semi-automatics, rounds of ammo.
No questions asked. Just “happy 18th birthday!”
So kid shoots grandma in the face, then speeds
to school, kills 19 trapped 4th Graders
and two teachers. Stops only when he’s shot.
Now come the questions; now, when it’s too late.
Just six months into 2022,
why 27 school shootings? Why?
Why should gunmen terrorize our lives?
Shootings in grocery stores, shootings in bars,
shootings in cinemas, shootings at spas,
shootings in synagogues, churches and mosques…
Freeway shootings, subway shootings,
shootings on the street.
A grudge. A gun. A ton of searing grief.
From politicians, waffling words and shrugs.
“What can you do?” blindfolded leaders bleat.
“Some people are just bad. Unhinged. Insane.
They’re broken. Laws can’t fix them. Yes, it’s sad.”
Does Congress realize that almost half
the guns on earth are here, within our borders?
A well-regulated militia…
The wording is a clue. Suggests a choice.
Regulations. Rules devised to curb
the leading cause of death for children: guns.
1.
Today we have an army. We don’t need
recruits bringing a blunderbuss to boot camp,
or citizens stockpiling snipers’ rifles.
If our domain becomes well-regulated,
what works for other countries might work here.
Fewer shattered families.
Less grief-without-end.
A small price to pay
for fewer small coffins,
fewer urns of ashes kept like shrines.
Copyright 5/2022 Patricia Doyne
UVALDE: THE LUCKY ONES
Shots explode from somewhere.
Is this real?
Teacher hustles kids inside.
Locks the classroom door.
Lights off.
Kids have practiced lockdown.
But this is not a drill.
Hit the floor.
Get under a desk, if you can.
Shh!
No shoving, no poking, no whispering.
Hold still. Keep quiet.
Pretend this is an empty classroom
The shooter breaks glass.
Sprays bullets through the window.
Teacher is hit in the leg.
Makes no sound.
Kids see her bleed.
Freeze,
too scared to whimper.
A child also bleeds,
grazed by a bullet.
Clenches her teeth.
The shooter hears no response.
Moves on.
Time stretches.
Every minute is endless.
Darkness fills with breathing.
Keep quiet.
Hope he won’t come back.
Hope to get out of here alive.
Hope friends are okay.
Can’t text—can’t risk a light.
Hope.
Close by, sudden gunfire.
Shouts. Screams.
More shots.
What is going on?
Who got shot?
A brother? A sister? A friend?
In the dark,
someone begins sobbing.
But no one moves.
He’s out there somewhere.
He might come back.
Time drags on.
Why doesn’t someone do something?
Call the cops?
Get that bad guy?
Let us out of here?
More shots.
When will this end?
Why is he shooting at us?
Can’t someone help us?
Anyone?
Anyone at all?
