By Maxine Kumin

From a documentary on marsupials I learn
that a pillowcase makes a fine
substitute pouch for an orphaned kangaroo.

I am drawn to such dramas of animal rescue.
They are warm in the throat. I suffer, the critic proclaims,
from an overabundance of maternal genes.

Bring me your fallen fledgling, your bummer lamb,

lead the abused, the starvelings, into my barn.
Advise the hunted deer to leap into my corn.

And had there been a wild child—
filthy and fierce as a ferret, he is called
in one nineteenth-century account—

a wild child to love, it is safe to assume,
given my fireside inked with paw prints,
there would have been room.

Think of the language we two, same and not-same,
might have constructed from sign,
scratch, grimace, grunt, vowel:

Laughter our first noun, and our long verb, howl.

• Living
• Relationships

Poet Bio

Maxine Kumin was born in Philadelphia and received her BA and MA from Radcliffe. In 1957, she met the poet Anne Sexton, with whom she became friends and exchanged poems until Sexton’s suicide in 1974. Kumin’s poetry, unlike Sexton’s, is traditional in its form and temperate in tone. She employs regular rhymes and common verse forms, such as iambic lines and quatrain stanzas, while discussing the themes of family and the inner life of women as they negotiate various roles in society. In her poem “Nurture,” Kumin combines the theme of maternity with descriptions of animal life and the natural world, which are also dominant themes in her poetry. See More By This Poet

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