A poem by Mihaela Moscaliuc, Ph.D., professor of English and graduate program director at Monmouth University, was published in the latest issue of The Progressive, a bimonthly magazine featuring investigative reporting, cultural and political analysis, and poetry.
Moscaliuc’s work, “On Digging for Worms,” describes a memory of her son uncovering earthworms in which Moscaliuc was caught between a desire to protect his innocence and an urge to talk to him about deaths that she feared.
In her poem, she writes: “for a school experiment,/he recites the worst deaths/—belly of a lion, belly of a wolf,/mouth of a crocodile,/as spider crushed by shoe,/in a toaster,/in your sleep,/mom look, the chipmunk’s back!/poisoned by a recluse,/old age like his grandfather,/can we feed him so he always comes back?/While eyes follow the forager/who darts below the deck,/the toy spade hits a root stub/and splits. He does not cry./I ache to hold him all the same/but rise instead to fetch/the pine nuts, maybe some peas/and cherries too, I chant/to divert my mind/from scrolling—/unmothered by shrapnel/unmothered by chokehold/mothers, how many, burying sons,/earth pungent with gunpowder/and not a day’s break/from fear.”
“The poem turned into a reminder to myself that to live in constant worry and fear about your child’s survival is something I have been spared, something I feel both deeply grateful for and something I also feel guilty about,” said Moscaliuc, acknowledging that millions of mothers around the world and in the U.S. live in political and manmade circumstances beyond their control, such as war and famine, racial, ethnic, and religious conflict, and poverty. “Gaza and Ukraine were on my mind, but I was also very much thinking of all mothers—not just Palestinian but also Israeli mothers, not just Ukrainian but also Russian mothers, the mothers of all Black sons killed brutally here in the U.S.—who lost their children to preventable deaths.”
Moscaliuc previously published another poem, “On Lava,” in a 2016 edition of The Progressive.
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