Hurry by Marie Howe

Hurry
Marie Howe

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.

SELECTED BY CAITLIN COWAN

Paradoxically, Marie Howe’s “Hurry” stops me in my tracks. Much of my own poetry critiques or bears witness rather than salves.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about lately: how and whether it can do both simultaneously. “Hurry” is such a poem—it examines our human foibles and points directly at pain and failure only to lift us into an exaltation of childhood, parenthood, and the divinity of our human fallibility.

The center stanza works like a mirror that we enter in order to be changed. That stanza’s first line, “Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?” cuts right into the meat of our existence on earth. Howe’s speaker assumes that when she gives her daughter the chance to do better than her, she will.

But our children reach first for what they have seen and been taught, and so the daughter replicates her mother’s tendencies. Here we can access the speaker’s self-forgiveness, as she learned how to mother from her own mother.

The stanza’s last line, “You be the mother,” shimmers with multiplicity of meaning, as the speaker’s game will one day give way to her own daughter’s coming of age.

This transference of power creates a poem that is not only vulnerable and wise but also steeped in female modes of knowledge.

I loved this poem long before I had a daughter, and now that I’m a mother, I can sometimes barely get through reading it without feeling the emotion climb up my throat.

I can only hope to write a poem as accomplished, as penetrating, and as meaningful as “Hurry” in my lifetime.

ABOUT CAITLIN COWAN

Caitlin Cowan is a writer and educator living on Michigan’s west coast. Her first book, Happy Everything, was published in 2024 by Cornerstone Press and was an IPPY Awards silver medalist and a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Awards’ Medal Provocateur. Her second book, Solitary, won the 2024 Pamet River Prize and will be published by YesYes Books in 2027. Since 2020, she has written regularly about the intersection of poetry and pop culture at PopPoetry.