Poem of the week: Hurry by Marie Howe | Books

Hurry

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store
and the gas station and the green market and
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,
as she runs along two or three steps behind me
her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?
To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?
Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,
Honey I’m sorry I keep saying Hurry –
you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking
back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,
hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

This week’s poem is by the New York poet Marie Howe, and appears in her first volume to have been published in the UK. Dedicated to her daughter, Grace Yi-Nan Howe, What the Earth Seemed to Say is a substantial selection of work, ranging from The Good Thief, published in the 1980s, to a group of recent poems from 2023. Howe is a writer well known for exploring Christian themes from innovative modern-dress perspectives, as in her 2017 collection Magdalene. Hurry, from the 2008 collection The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, is a secular poem, but a morally self-questioning one. It’s also an example of Howe’s skill at turning an everyday anecdote into a parable.

Narrative pacing is an important part of that skill. Hurry begins with a slow treadmill of daily chores for the mother and her small daughter, indicated by that desultory list of places they must stop at, and the repeated conjunction “and”. But the last “and”, cunningly placed at the end of the second line, transfers us abruptly into a new tone and territory.

By interrupting the flow of the poem, the command by the mother-speaker to the daughter to “Hurry up honey” can be seen to interrupt the child’s own consciousness. The details of the little girl’s appearance (“blue jacket unzipped and socks rolled down”) suggest the freedom and casualness of childhood. The daughter is running along a few steps behind her mother, perhaps absorbed in her own thoughts and only faintly aware of the bleak adult drive to get things done.

The speaker’s sudden challenge to herself, “Where do I want her to hurry to?” is answered by further questions, harsh ones that plainly articulate the unthinkable: the child’s distant grave, first, and then the speaker’s, “Where one day she might stand all grown?” The second line of this verse is the crux of the poem.

A swerve back to the present occurs in the same verse, another abrupt but effective shift of pace. The mother has withheld her apology until all the errands have been completed. Now she tries to correct her impatience, making parental power give way to childhood in a simple game of role reversal: “you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.”

It’s both amusing and unnerving, perhaps, that the child, like any child, slips easily into the mimicry of authority. She runs ahead and calls back, laughing, but using a slightly more formal and forceful vocabulary than the mother, whose commands began with the endearment, “Honey”. The child pretends a firmer tone with her “Hurry up now darling…/hurry, hurry”.

But the poem is focused less on the redistribution of authority than the unavoidable redistribution of time. The child’s taking of the house keys from the mother’s hands and running ahead with them is an expression of her inevitable claim on the future. One generation recedes as another goes forwards for its own temporary period of ownership and control.

Howe doesn’t push her poem towards a metaphorical dimension, but I imagined that the two figures, mother and child, might personify an old year and a new, and remind us of the transition currently occurring. I’ll take this as an opportunity, then, to wish readers a happy 2025.