Hurry

As we return to school this week, and some of us start preschool, there’s a poem that reminds me to take it easy, and take it in. It’s “Hurry,” by Marie Howe, New York’s poet laureate from 2012 to 2014. She adopted her daughter when she was in her 50s, so it’s just the two of them. This adds intimacy to the poem, but its dynamics will be familiar to anyone with children — or with parents, for that matter. I know the feeling of hurrying through life, and trying to hurry children, which always seems to slow them down. The poem makes me ponder what’s gained by hurrying, being on time, getting things done, and what might be lost.

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,   
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.

I like the way the ‘hurry, hurry,’ and all the other ‘h’ sounds give the poem its pulse, its hurrying breath. There’s pathos in the little girl running behind with her blue jacket unzipped, and something more than pathos in the girl all grown beside the grave in the still middle of the poem. The middle slows us down, as though the poet stopped in the street to ask herself why all this hurry; to picture where it might lead them. Then the hurry begins again, but this time it’s a game, a joke between them. It restores all the childish joy that’s missing from the bustle in the first stanza. Here the hurry is parody, a happy travesty of haste. The final gesture — taking the house keys — takes away weary, rushing adulthood from the mother, and gives back play, make believe, time unmetered and untethered. It could have been a lecture, but it’s the laughter in this poem that tugs at my jacket and asks me: Where are you hurrying to? Why?