20 Famous And Short Poems on Motherhood

short poems on motherhood

What it means to be a mother can’t be put into words. It takes a lot of courage, strength, and grace to raise a baby. The unconditional love that a mother has for her child is incredible. She never stops giving her everything for the family and her children. We need to appreciate motherhood and the sacrifices of mothers by all means. To honor the love and care of a mother, we combined some epic and lovable motherhood poems that are truly heart-touching.

20 Epic And Lovable Motherhood Poems

These poems on motherhood will help you understand the struggles of a mother and bring you a little more closer to your mother. Read on.

Short Poems About Motherhood

Read through this collection of short poems about motherhood. Send these to your mom to show your love for her.

1. Motherhood

Motherhood oh motherhood….
Why must you be so challengingly….
Motherhood motherhood why must you test the test of time????
Motherhood why must new moms feel they know it all….
Motherhood you have the most experience why can’t you show the show?? Walk the walk… Motherhood motherhood why can you know you’re not always the best..
Motherhood motherhood not everyone is the same…

– By Sharon

2. Mother to Son

Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.

So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

– By Langston Hughes

[ Read: 25 Best Mother’s Day Quotes From Son ]

3. I will have to wait till I’m a mother

I struggle so deeply
To understand
How someone can
Pour their entire soul
Blood and energy
Into someone
Without wanting
Anything in return

– By Rupi Kaur

4. The Sweetest Mother

Our mother is the sweetest and
Most delicate of all.
She knows more of paradise
Than angels can recall.
She’s not only beautiful
But passionately young,
Playful as a kid, yet wise
As one who has lived long.
Her love is like the rush of life,
A bubbling, laughing spring
That runs through all like liquid light
And makes the mountains sing.

– By Pamela

5. Mother

The water of her womb, your first home.
The body she pulled apart to welcome you to the world. The spirit in you she helped grow with all she knew. The heart that she gave you when yours fell apart. You are her soft miracle.
So she gave you her eyes to see the best in the worst. You carry your mother in your eyes.
Make her proud of all she watches you do.

– By Nikita Gill

Sylvia Plath Motherhood Poems

Sylvia Plath’s poems about motherhood are a gem in themselves. They showcase the incredible experience of being a mother.

6. Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue. In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen: A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

– By Sylvia Plath

7. Stillborn

These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis.

They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn’t for any lack of mother-love.

O I cannot explain what happened to them!
They are proper in shape and number and every part.
They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!
They smile and smile and smile at me.
And still the lungs won’t fill and the heart won’t start.

They are not pigs, they are not even fish,
Though they have a piggy and a fishy air
It would be better if they were alive, and that’s what they were.
But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction,
And they stupidly stare and do not speak of her.

– Sylvia Plath

Christian Motherhood Poems

Thank your mother for giving birth to you and for all the hard work while raising you. Have a look at these Christian motherhood poems and acknowledge your mother’s love.

8. Wonderful Mother of Mine

I pray every night to our Father above,
For that wonderful mother of mine.
I ask Him to keep her as long as He can
That wonderful mother of mine.

There are treasures on earth,
That made life seem worthwhile, But there’s none can compare
To my mother’s smile.

– Clyde Hager

9. Motherhood

The dearest gifts that heaven holds,
The very finest, too,
Were made into one pattern
That was perfect, sweet, and true;

The Angels smiled, well-pleased, and said:
“Compared to all the others,
This pattern is so wonderful
Let’s use it just for Mothers!”

And through the years a mother has been
All that’s sweet and good
For there’s one bit of God and love,
In all true Motherhood.

– Helen Steiner Rice

10. To Mother

You painted no Madonnas
On chapel walls in Rome,
But with a touch diviner
You lived one in your home.
You wrote no lofty poems
That critics counted art,
But with a nobler vision
You lived them in your heart.
You carved no shapeless marble
To some high-souled design,
But with a finer sculpture
You shaped this soul of mine.
You built no great cathedrals
That centuries applaud,
But with a grace exquisite
Your life cathedraled God.
Had I the gift of Raphael,
Or Michelangelo,
Oh, what a rare Madonna
My mother’s life would show!

– Thomas W. Fessenden

11. Thank God for Mother’s Love

There is no love, like a mother’s love,
No stronger bond on earth.
Like the precious bond that comes from God,
To a mother, when she gives birth.

A mother’s love is forever strong,
Never changing for all time.
And when her children need her most,
A mother’s love will shine.

God bless these special mothers,
God bless them every one.
For all the tears and heartache,
And for the special work they’ve done.

When her days on earth are over,
A mother’s love lives on.
Through many generations,
With God’s blessings on each one.

Be thankful for our mothers,
For they love with a higher love.
From the power God has given,
And the strength from up above.

– Anon

12. A Mother’s Love

A Mother’s love, a Mother’s care,
A Mother’s sigh, a Mother’s prayer
A Mother’s work, and Mother’s day,
Leaves little time for any play.

A Godly Mother with Godly love,
Is treasure from God above,
A Godly Mother with Godly care,
Has God’s help when she sighs a prayer.

– Calvin M Lake

Inspirational Poems On Motherhood

Mothers are the first teacher and most inspiring person for every child. Share these poems with your mother to make them feel special and loved.

13. For My Mother

Once more
I summon you
Out of the past
With poignant love,
You who nourished the poet
And the lover.
I see your gray eyes
Looking out to sea
In those Rockport summers,
Keeping a distance
Within the closeness
Which was never intrusive
Opening out
Into the world.
And what I remember
Is how we laughed
Till we cried
Swept into merriment
Especially when times were hard.
And what I remember
Is how you never stopped creating
And how people sent me
Dresses you had designed
With rich embroidery
In brilliant colors
Because they could not bear
To give them away
Or cast them aside.
I summon you now
Not to think of
The ceaseless battle
With pain and ill health,
The frailty and the anguish.
No, today I remember
The creator,
The lion-hearted.
– By May Sarton

14. Foreign Body

This is a poem on my mother’s body,
I mean, my mother’s body, I mean the one
Who saved her braid of blue-black hair
In a drawer when I was little.

Meaning one I could lean against
Against not in resistance.
Fuzzy dress Of wuzzy one.
Red lipstick one.
Kitchen one. Her one to me,

Bad-ger bad-ger

Or so I heard. The one body
I write on Like Daddy’s blank studio wall
With my colored pencils.
About seeing her skin

As she bathed in the afternoon
Was I five? It was summer.

Then today’s winter where again
I call that bath to mind.
I cannot leave her body alone.
Which is how I found Mother in the bath
Escaping the heat of a 1950s house,

Father on a ladder with blowtorch
To scrape the paint off the outside.

Badger badger
The sun in the suburbs
Simmered the tar roof over our rooms

In the town where only wasps lived
Inside paper cells beneath eaves and roots.
And they hurt very much, the wasps.

Now I am sixty. Sweet as dried papaya.
My hair, a bit tarnished,
My inmost, null.

Memory is failing away
As if an image shattered to shards then
Recollected for a kaleidoscope:

I click the pieces into sharp arrangements
Grouse, crow, craven
No, now, my own daughter turns sovereign

– Kimiko Hahn

15. Mother o’ Mine

If I were hanged on the highest hill,
Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!
I know whose love would follow me still,
Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!

If I were drowned in the deepest sea,
Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!
I know whose tears would come down to me,
Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!

If I were damned of body and soul,
I know whose prayers would make me whole,
Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!
– By Rudyard Kipling

16. What I Learned From My Mother

I learned from my mother how to love

The living, to have plenty of vases on hand
In case you have to rush to the hospital
With peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
Still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars
Large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
Grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
And peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
And flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.
I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know
The deceased, to press the moist hands
Of the living, to look in their eyes and offer
Sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.
I learned that whatever we say means nothing,
What anyone will remember is that we came.
I learned to believe I had the power to ease
Awful pains materially like an angel.
Like a doctor, I learned to create
From another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once
You know how to do this, you can never refuse.
To every house you enter, you must offer
Healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,
The blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.

– ByJulia Kasdorf

17. Before I Was Myself, You Made Me, Me

Before I was myself you made me, me
With love and patience, discipline and tears,
Then bit by bit stepped back to set me free,
Allowing me to sail upon my sea,
Though well within the headlands of your fears.
Before I was myself you made me, me

With dreams enough of what
I was to be And hopes that would be sculpted by the years,
Then bit by bit stepped back to set me free,

Relinquishing your powers gradually
To let me shape myself among my peers.
Before I was myself you made me, me,

And being good and wise, you gracefully
As dancers when the last sweet cadence nears
Bit by bit stepped back to set me free.

For love inspires learning naturally:
The mind assents to what the heart reveres.
And so it was through love you made me, me
By slowly stepping back to set me free.

– Unknown

18. First Weeks

Those first weeks, I don’t know if I knew
How to love our daughter. Her face looked crushed,
Crumpled with worry-and not even
Despair, but just depression, a look of
Endurance. The skin of her face was finely
Wrinkled, there were wisps of hair on her ears,
She looked a little like a squirrel, suspicious,
Tranced. And smallish, 6.13,
Wizened-she looked as if she were wincing
Away from me without moving. The first
Moment I had seen her, my glasses off,
In the delivery room, a blur of blood,
And blue skin, and limbs, I had known her,
Upside down, and they righted her, and there
Came that faint, almost sexual, wail, and her
Whole body flushed rose.
When I saw her next, she was bound in cotton,
Someone else had cleaned her, wiped
The inside of my body off her
And combed her hair in narrow scary
Plough-lines. She was ten days early;
Seepy, the breast so engorged it stood out nearly
Even with the nipple, her lips would so much as
Approach it, it would hiss and spray.
In two days we took her home, she shrieked
and whimpered, like a dream of a burn victim,
And when she was quiet, she would lie there and peer, not quite
Anxiously. I didn’t blame her,
She’d been born to my mother’s daughter. I would kneel
And gaze at her, and pity her.
All day I nursed her, all night I walked her,
And napped, and nursed, and walked her.
And then, One day, she looked at me, as if
She knew me. She lay along my forearm, fed, and
Gazed at me as if remembering me,
As if she had known me, and liked me, and was getting
Her memory back. When she smiled at me,
Delicate rictus like a birth-pain coming,
I fell in love, I became human.

– Sharon Olds

[ Read: 25 Best Mother’s Day Quotes From Daughter ]

19. To My Mother

Because I feel that, in the Heavens above,
The angels, whispering to one another,
Can find, among their burning terms of love,
None so devotional as that of “Mother,”
Therefore by that dear nameI long have called you
You who are more than mother unto me,
And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you
In setting my Virginia’s spirit free.
My mother—my own mother, who died early,
Was but the mother of myself; but you
Are mother to the one I loved so dearly,
And thus are dearer than the mother I knew
By that infinity with which my wife
Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life.

– Edgar Allan Poe

20. Dawn

Of your hand I could say this
A bird poised mid-air in flight
As delicate and smooth.

Of your mouth
A foxglove in its taking
Without edges or hurt.

This of your ear
A tiny sea-horse, immortal
Sporting in white waves

And of your eye
A place where no one could hide
Nothing lurk.

Of your cupped flesh
Smooth in my palm
An agate on the sea-shore

Of your back and belly
That they command kisses.
And of your feet I would say

They are inquisitive and gay
As squirrels or birds
And so return to your hand

And begin my voyage
Around your loveliness
Again and yet again
As in my arms you lie sleeping.

– Jeni Couzyn

Some of these poems portray the real experience that women go through during their pregnancy and motherhood. Nobody can love the way a mother loves her child. Share these heart-touching motherhood poems with your mother to show how much you love her for what she is.

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