Blog Post #3- A Poem for My Sons

                 Like the majority of the class, I really enjoyed “A Letter to a Teenage Daughter.”  However, I also really enjoyed “A Poem for My Sons” by Minnie Bruce Pratt, and I think it deserved more recognition than it was given.  It must have been very hard for Pratt to leave her sons when she came out as a lesbian.  I’m sure she felt very guilty of the abandonment her sons must have felt for their mother leaving them.   Pratt chose to claim her own identity instead of living a false life with her former husband and sons, and this decision changed the rest of her life.

                 “A Poem for My Sons” is one way she took out her frustrations for being disallowed to care for her sons.  “Your father was then/ the poet I’d ceased to be when I got married./ It’s taken me years to write this to you.”  This line surely exhibits the longing that Pratt had to be a writer, but feared to do so since men were always the dominant sex of poets.  She also probably feared losing her sons, since in her biography it says that “Pratt’s poetry reflects many dimensions of her lesbian experience.”  She couldn’t write and let out her honest feelings and opinions until she claimed her true identity as a lesbian.  Thus, it seems that if she attempted writing while her sons were babies they would have been taken away from her.  She waited it out until her sons were at least a little older so they could better handle the ordeal of her not being around.  This also makes me curious if Pratt would have left her family if she had daughters, instead of sons?  She writes in the poem that new fathers prayed “that his daughter lack opinions,/ his son be high and mighty, think and act.”  This line shows the stereotypical thought that fathers favor their sons over their daughters.  So, Pratt probably imagined that leaving her sons with her husband couldn’t be the worst thing for them.  On the other hand, if they had daughters, her husband may have looked down on them and not of raised them as well a mother would have.