1 April 2017
Daddy reciting Yeats 
Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild: With a faery, hand in hand. For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand…and I went out to the hazel wood,. Because a fire was in my head….
Mama reciting Kipling Though I’ve belted you and flayed you, By the livin’ Gawd that made you, You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!…as she mopped our lil trailer floors….
and Wordsworth and Coleridge and Blake…Little Lamb who made thee. Dost thou know who made thee. Gave thee life & bid thee feed…the sing-songy hopefulness of Edgar Guest, the inquiry and longing of Emily Dickinson I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too?….and Poe But we loved with a love that was more than love— /I and my Annabel Lee—
and always, always, always Frost Something there is that doesn’t love a wall….Say something to us we can learn/By heart and when alone repeat./Say something! And it says, ‘I burn.’/But say with what degree of heat….
and the one they both would use to reassure and encourage their odd and poet daughter, who even then, they understood, would have to scuff and stumble to find her own way
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Oh and Whitman!!! Still the poet I read most frequently, still the singer of my wild child’s heart
Thank you, Mama Thank you, Daddy I owe all the poetry in my life to both of you. We had very little materially, but oh the poetry
Make art about what your parents gave you.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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