Juanita Brunk

The structure of this piece lends it much of its meaning. Brunk chose to write “Where My Mother Cries” as a sestina, a poetic form from twelfth-century France. The sestina is composed of six sestets, or six-line stanzas, with a tercet, or three-line stanza, to close. The poet must repeat the end words of each of the sestets’ lines in a set pattern throughout the poem, which gives the poem a sense of repetition and conversation, useful in storytelling, as the form has traditionally been utilized. The final tercet uses all six of the poem’s main words, two to a line. One of the words is situated in the middle of each line, while the other ends the line.

The six highlighted words in a sestina are usually common and conversational in order to help in storytelling and the poem’s flow, which is true of Brunk’s choice of words: gold, leaves, bowls, house, ruin, and woman. By the end of the poem, all of these words have come to hold new symbolic meaning. This is especially true of the images of bowls, which come to signify a deep emptiness through their descriptions as “capsized” and “dark” and ruinous. Even full of soup, they lack comfort, as the poet’s mother rejects the bowls’ contents.

The poem opens with the phrase, “It is always November.” These four words create a setting and tone for the poem. If readers interpret the title as part of the poem, we understand that in the place where the speaker’s mother cries, it always feels like the month of November. As the poet tells the story of her mother’s November in her poem, she begins describing previous happier autumns, when her mother set out leaves and evergreens and mums in silver bowls. The speaker describes herself as a young girl taking her mother a picture of the two of them she has drawn at school.  The speaker desperately desires to please her mother, but in the second sestet she tells her readers that in the picture she and her mother are “smiling in the face of ruin: / trees with black leaves, / a burning house.” Brunk destroys the stereotypical images of a bright and lively autumn and a cozy house of shelter with these three lines. Black leaves serve as a stark negative contrast to the “brightest leaves” of the first sestet and nudge the reader further toward the sense of depression the speaker describes throughout the poem.

As the poem progresses, the speaker describes her mother’s depression more fully. She tells her readers, in the fourth sestet, that “ruin / [is] a dark bowl / [her] mother has fallen into, and will not leave.” The word “bowl” conveys emptiness and, in turn, the longing to be filled. The adjective “dark” adds a sense of foreboding to the empty bowl, making it a hopeless place of ruin.

The speaker introduces her father as someone who offers her mother “bowls / of soup,” which her mother refuses. Brunk develops the tension between husband and wife by writing, immediately following this, “Once a woman/ begins to leave / she might leave / everything, her house, / her children.”  The placement of this observation implies that the speaker’s father is more afraid of being left with home and children to care for than his wife’s loss of health, a disheartening thought. Also interesting to note is the first use of “leave” in the above quote, which has a parallel both to the manner in which trees drop their leaves in autumn and to a comment in the last sestet of the poem, where Brunk calls autumn leaves “summer’s ruin.” This fits the context of the poem, in which the speaker’s mother has fallen into ruin.

The final sestet ends with the poet’s observation (or warning) that “Once the woman / recognizes ruin, / it might be everywhere,” a statement about the pervasive nature of depression. The final tercet, however, appears as an addendum: “Where my mother cries, a woman gathers autumn leaves. / They look like gold, or summer’s ruin. / The silver bowls are mine. There is no house."  The last line of this message is cryptic.  If there is no house, is the entire situation the poet’s imagination? If the silver bowls are hers, is the depression also hers, or has she simply inherited the bowls of happy autumns from her mother?

Brunk’s poem utilizes both imagery and form to create a beautiful and haunting image of a depressed woman. Brunk successfully explores the complex relationship between speaker and mother using descriptions of fall's colors and leaves, as well as other household imagery.

Erin Brandeberry
erinabgoshen.edu