Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and whether you were fortunate enough to get to spend time with yours or were perhaps laying flowers on her grave, I hope you took the time to appreciate her somehow. While SevenPonds paid tribute to departed mothers on the holiday, today I’m looking at a poem from a mother’s point of view. As its name implies, “A Mother’s Lament,” by Robert Burns, expresses the sadness of a mother who has just lost her son:

Fate gave the word, the arrow sped,

And pierc’d my darling’s heart;

And with him all the joys are fled

Life can to me impart.

By cruel hands the sapling drops,

In dust dishonour’d laid;

So fell the pride of all my hopes,

My age’s future shade.

The mother-linnet in the brake

Bewails her ravish’d young;

So I, for my lost darling’s sake,

Lament the live-day long.

Death, oft I’ve feared thy fatal blow.

Now, fond, I bare my breast;

O, do thou kindly lay me low

With him I love, at rest!

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