family

Dubbing Me

lillian4 Comments

Mother named me Lillian
her mother’s namesake.
My father’s twin sister’s moniker as well,
much to my mother’s chagrin.
She chose the middle name of Mae
after a favorite aunt,
the likes of who I don’t recall.
But because of her,
twelve cousins called me Lilly Mae.
To everyone else, I was Lillian

The momentous moment of change came
when my parents left me on my own
to begin my college days.
First person I met on that idyllic campus,
I announced my name as Lill
and that’s who I became.
Years later, titles attached themselves.
Mrs. Hallberg, high school teacher.
Dr. Hallberg, the PhD kind.
Dean Hallberg, career topper.

Now rejuvenated (never say retired)
I’m happily back to Lill.
Except when I’m lillian-the-home-poet.
Capitalization not preferred
because after all, it’s just me.


NAPOWRIMO Day 21. Prompt: Write a poem in which you muse on your name and nicknames you’ve been given.

PHOTO of my mother and I and my new two-wheeler bicycle. From tricycle to this. In the 1950s, either they didn’t have small bikes or “training wheels” for kids to learn on or else my folks could only afford to buy me one “big girl’s bike”. One distinct memory I have of my childhood is my dad hanging on to the back of this bike, running along on the sidewalk while I was trying to balance, feeling like I was flying and then looking back and seeing him half-way down the block behind me! I don’t recall if I immediately fell or not….I just remember that feeling and then seeing him so far away, realizing I was riding on my own!

Where Does Love Go?

lillian12 Comments

Family of four,
both mother, father gone now.
Their love still lives on
in the way their children love.
Circle of love unending.


A Tanka written for Tuesday Poetics at dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. Kim asks us to write a poem using the title Where Does Love Go and answer the question within the poem.

Go to https://lillianthehomepoet.com/2026/03/24/a-haibun-family-tradition/ to understand my personal meaning for the Circle of Love. Image from Pixabay.com

Tanka: a Japanese poetic form of 5 lines with the syllabic count of 5-7-5-7-7 Some say it’s a haiku that keeps on going!

She was my mother. . .

lillian6 Comments

“He went to sea in a thimble of poetry.” 
Opening line in the poem Poet Warning, by Jim Harrison.

Wynken, Blyken and Nod
my childhood friends,
lived in the well-turned pages
of mother’s Child Craft Poetry Book.
So many friends who made me smile.
The Old Lady who lived in a shoe,
Miss Muffet sitting primly on her tuffet,
Old King Cole and Jack Sprat too.

We laughed about the crazy cow
who jumped over the moon.
I lived in those pages then,
where no one yelled at anyone.
Sitting on mother’s lap
I’d hug my yellow teddy-bear
smeared with mother’s lipstick,
so at least, it always smiled at me.

When mama took out that book
I knew she’d take me
to magical places.
And for those moments
her love for me was real and clear.
So calm, so comforting,
so warm, so fun, so motherly,
in those make-believe lands.

And here I am, decades later
near to being an octogenarian,
wondering why I write poetry.
I’d forgotten this side of her,
so many other memories crowding in.
I live by the words, “no regrets”
always have and always will.
So I am thankful to remember
this other side of who she was.



NAPOWRIMO Day 12. Prompt: Write a poem that recounts a memory of a beloved relative and something they did that echoes through your thoughts today.

Image from an illustration in the book, which I still have. Published in 1947, the year I was born.

I remember . . .

lillian4 Comments

. . . our December twenty-fourth dinners
with Alice’s jello salad and pineapple-coconut bars.
Rather than bowing our heads and saying grace,
we shared cards at the table.
One for my mother, dad and brother.
And theirs to me.

Raising our family,
the tradition continued.
Handwritten notes inside meant the most.
Some just covered with Xs and Os,
some with a memory from that year.
Always a personalized declaration of love.

Alice’s recipe is long forgotten.
But miles away, with children of their own,
our children still live the card tradition.
Now, almost in our octogenarian years,
we still smile knowingly on those nights
as we reach for the personalized card on our plate.

It’s NAPOWRIMO (National Poetry Writing Month) day 2! Today we’re asked to “write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.” Photo from an old photo album…note the writing at the bottom of the photo. Yep, that’s me with my brother (9 years older than me) and my mother.

A Haibun: Family Tradition

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From the time our children were two and four, we’ve held hands before our evening meal and sung a song called The Circle of Love. With a simple and happy tune, the words go like this:

“The circle of love goes around and round
the circle of love goes around.
Reach out your hands someone needs you.
The circle of love goes around. Amen.”

It’s not by others’ standards, a real table grace. Grace is often defined as the free, unmerited favor and love of God toward humanity. And a short prayer before a meal is often called “saying grace”. For us, this singing together before supper was and always is a moment to celebrate family. Smiling at each other, sometimes grinning, we sing loudly and with energy. What we’re really singing about is the unconditional love and happiness we share. No matter the food – from cheesey chicken casserole to shrimp scampi to Thanksgiving turkey, The Circle of Love was always the first course of the meal.

Now, approaching our octogenarian years, with five grandchildren who are twenty, eighteen, and fifteen, and our children and their wonderful spouses in their fifties, we treasure the rare times we are all together. The eleven of us, or a fewer number on occasions when busy lives and miles intervene, still carry on this tradition. When we come to the table for an evening meal, no matter the happenings of the day, the first thing we do is join hands. And then we sing, loud and clear. Grateful for each other and for the meal we share.

Wild flowers in fields
different shapes, sizes, colors
always face the sun.


Written for dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. Today Punam is hosting Tuesday Poetics presenting us with the following prompt: “For today’s Poetics, I would love a presence of food in your poems. You can employ any form but touch upon food; vegetables, fruits, meat, dairy, desserts you love or hate. It could be about why you love/abhor cooking/baking, your most memorable/miserable meal ever, your relationship with food…the possibilities are endless.” No particular form or length is required.
A Haibun is a Japanese poetic form that combines prose with a haiku.
I guess you could say I’ve written about my family’s relaionship with the evening meal!

Photo is from a family gathering about six years ago.

Parenting

lillian12 Comments

Chrysalis like. Our arms, our home.
Enveloping, nurturing,
encouraging evolving independence.

Teaching skills. Helping. Watching.
Too soon the dividing line appeared,
between the now and what was coming.

Responsibilities increased. Yours not ours.
Your departures, more frequent,
measured at first in hours, not miles.

Your wings. Expected, prepared for.
We marveled and smiled. Waved at you . . .
and then you were gone.

Distance multiplied. Time stretched separations.
Hairline fractures of the heart,
smiling our love through goodbyes.

Parenting children to adulthood.
Learning to live through changing times,
adjusting to the moving margins.


Written for dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. Today Dora asks us to write about a poem that somehow talks about margins. She gives many examples of margins. As a septuagenarian with two happily married children and five grandchildren, I thought about living through moving margins as a parent and thus, this poem.

Ode to a Family Table

lillian3 Comments

Praises to the table,
the one our family gathered round.
You held court with meals,
never minded spilled morsels.
Gained rings in the process
from sloppy milk glasses.

You listened without judgement.
Heard the hijinks of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle,
knock-knock jokes, teacher complaints,
family disagreements, high school gossip,
vacation plans, college choice deliberations,
and joyfully sung table graces.

You welcomed guests
who crammed in extra chairs.
More elbows leaning in,
more spills, raucous laughter.
Birthday party guests and gangly teens
who occasionally kicked your legs.

Now in another house
but still in the family,
serving another generation.
From toddlers punching playdough
to kids’ paints slopping on your surface,
you still stand proud after all these years.


Written for day 9, NaPoWriMo. The challenge is to write a poem every day in April, which is National Poetry Writing Month.

The NaPoWriMo challenge today, takes a page from the famous poet Pablo Neruda. His poetry, translated to English, is treasured by many. Among his poetry are a series of Odes. An ode is a poem written in praise of a person, place or object. The challenge today? “Write your own ode celebrating an everyday object.”

Photos are of our family table over the years….could not find any when our kids were infants or toddlers. We sure celebrated many a birthday at this table! The table has been at our daughter’s home since her children were very young. They grew up at the same table their mama and uncle did. Last two photos are of our daughter’s and son’s children sitting at the table in more recent years.

We Are Family

lillian2 Comments

Family gathering
love, laughter, reminiscing.
Like the inevitability of spring,
our connections bloom again.


Written off-prompt, for NaPoWriMo. It’s National Poetry Writing and the challenge is to write a poem every day in April.

Written today, on the occasion of a family gathering this weekend in Chicago, to celebrate the lives of Joanne and Ed Schnackenbeck.

Prosery for today . . .

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One of four children, her parents died before the age of sixty from massive heart attacks. Her two sisters did the same; as did her brother. She buried her youngest sister on her own birthday and did the same with her only son, who died at fifty-one, also from a heart attack. Her husband died at seventy-three, from complications following open heart surgery. She defied familial medical history and lived to eighty-one, her own heart having been broken many times. She was my mother.

When they called, I rushed to her side. Congestive heart failure finally took its toll. “We’d like to operate,” the doctor said. She quietly shook her head. “I’m so tired, Lillian.” I held her hand and she smiled. But that smile was the last smile to come upon her face. I whispered, “Go and find dad, mom.” And she did.

Written for Prosery Monday at dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. Today Lisa asks us to use the line, “But that smile was the last smile to come upon her face” in a piece of prose, no more than 144 words in length, sans title. The line is from the poem Ballad of Birmingham, written in 1968 by Dudley Randall. My mother, Helen Cecile Petitclair Gruenwald died in 1998. I had the privilege of being at her side as she transitioned to another world. I remember it clearly.

Recipe for My Son and Daughter to Discover Their Family Tree

lillian21 Comments

Discover with me your family tree.
Ignore online apps promising filigree.

Instead, help me decorate my Christmas tree.
String tiny lights round and round with glee.
Stand on tip toe to place Grampa’s ribbon rose
at the very top, where it always goes.

Hang wooden orange giraffe
beside spunky little brown horse.
Decades ago they made you laugh,
hanging above your crib, of course.

Be extra gentle with the pink glass bell,
fragile as a thin egg shell.
Your grandmother’s as a small child,
looking at it, she always smiled.

Add red ornament with letters painted white,
Lillian spelled out, still brings delight.
Made by my teacher in first grade,
her love for students proudly displayed.

Treasure these ornaments year after year
so many belonged to family so dear.
Behold this memory filled Christmas tree,
see and touch your ancestry.

Written for dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. Grace provides us with the last prompt for 2023 as we will now be on hiatus until January 1. She asks us to write a culinary rhyming recipe poem.

While we do indeed have a number of recipes handed down from generation to generation in my family, I’ve taken a bit of poetic license and written a poem with a “recipe” for my adult children (now 47 and 49; I’m 76) to discover their ancestry/family tree by looking at the ornaments on my Christmas tree. Just a few are mentioned in the poem. There many more including a fragile airplane that was on my father’s tree when he was a little boy. You can see it in the photo, next to my mother’s pink bell. There are ornaments made by my children’s babysitters; two painted by my father; some made by neighbors from the house where we raised our children; some made or given to us by aunts and uncles; sadly some given to us by relatives now gone from this earth. There are ornaments made by our kids when they were 4 and some when they were in grade school. There are ornaments collected from family vacations. It is what I often call a memory tree. Almost every ornament has its own story. In a way, they are the ingredients, melded together and on display, that enable us to reconnect with our family every year, no matter the distance or time that separates us; no matter if they have left this earth and only reside in our hearts.

Whatever holidays you celebrate, I hope they are joyful and shared with loved ones. I also wish everyone a happy and healthy New Year.