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Enduring Love

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when he was twelve.

Then he passed her right up

like a bamboo shoot

on a damp summer day.

She didn't care.

She stuck her finger high

in the air, right in his face,

The other hand at the waist.

They could be anywhere

and she'd give him

That stare,

that he read as a warning equivalent to the sign

in front of a nuclear power plant.

Only she

could do that to him .

And that's as true an experience of mothers and children as you'll find anywhere, brown or white, in verse or in prose.

Jennifer Howard, a former contributing editor of Book World, is a staff writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education and a contributor to the forthcoming "DC Noir."

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