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Tracy K. Smith’s “Einstein’s Mother” · The Daily Poem

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  [music]
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  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, October 19th, 2026.
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  SPEAKER_00: Today's poem is by poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, and it's called Einstein's Mother.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and read it one more time.
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  SPEAKER_00: Einstein's Mother.
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  SPEAKER_00: Was he mute a while, or all tears?
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  SPEAKER_00: Did he raise his hands to his ears so he could scream, scream, scream?
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  SPEAKER_00: Did he eat only with his fists?
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  SPEAKER_00: Did he eat as if something inside of him would never be fed?
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  SPEAKER_00: Did he arch his back and hammer his heels into the floor
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  SPEAKER_00: the minute there was something he sought?
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  SPEAKER_00: And did you feel yourself caught there,
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  SPEAKER_00: wanting to let go,
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  SPEAKER_00: to run, to be called back to wherever your two tangled souls had sprung from?
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  SPEAKER_00: Did you ever feel as though something were rising up inside you, a fire-white ghost?
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  SPEAKER_00: Did you feel pity, and for whom?
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  SPEAKER_00: This poem is born out of the historical reality that Einstein was indeed
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  SPEAKER_00: a difficult child, or rather he had a difficult childhood.
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  SPEAKER_00: He was slow in coming to language,
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  SPEAKER_00: to speech, that he could be temperamental, and often those things go together.
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  SPEAKER_00: Children who can't...
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  SPEAKER_00: There are of course many mothers who deal with many difficult children
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  SPEAKER_00: and Smith seems to offer up the
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  SPEAKER_00: The life of Einstein,
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  SPEAKER_00: who of course grew up to be a rather remarkable individual as a kind
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  SPEAKER_00: of encouragement to mothers like his,
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  SPEAKER_00: who in the midst of the struggle early on faced with the acorn,
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  SPEAKER_00: can't see the oak tree that it will grow into,
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  SPEAKER_00: can't see what their labors and their loves are leading to.
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  SPEAKER_00: Seeing this poem on the page, one of the first things you notice is the lack of question marks.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's all questions, but all of the punctuation, the end marks are periods.
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  SPEAKER_00: It emphasizes that these are all kind of rhetorical questions,
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  SPEAKER_00: that the answer is understood or assumed to a degree,
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  SPEAKER_00: and that all of the questions are driving at something.
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  SPEAKER_00: However,
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  SPEAKER_00: lurking behind even the encouragement of this poem is the uncertainty
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  SPEAKER_00: that surrounds every human life.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that becomes a challenge to mothers who statistically will not look back
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  SPEAKER_00: and realize that they have raised an Albert Einstein or Mother Teresa or...
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  SPEAKER_00: A Shakespeare or a Mr. Rogers,
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  SPEAKER_00: but merely a Steve or a Bill or a Sally who has their strengths
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  SPEAKER_00: and has their weaknesses and has their gifts and their human pettiness
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  SPEAKER_00: and other foibles like the rest of us.
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  SPEAKER_00: And maybe the periods in place of the question marks also suggest that one has
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  SPEAKER_00: to be settled on these questions in order to succeed.
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  SPEAKER_00: That the value of this endeavor has to be decided upon in advance.
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  SPEAKER_00: There can be no question mark, only a full stop.
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  SPEAKER_00: The labor and the love must be, in a certain sense, their own purpose.
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  SPEAKER_00: Justification in their own fulfillment.
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  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise,
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  SPEAKER_00: most mothers waiting for the emergence of a rare world historical individual
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  SPEAKER_00: to prove that their endeavors were worthwhile are going to be sorely disappointed.
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  SPEAKER_00: And they ought not be.
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  SPEAKER_00: So there is a caution,
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  SPEAKER_00: lest anyone presume, but this poem does offer an encouragement, lest anyone despair.
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  SPEAKER_00: Here it is one more time.
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  SPEAKER_00: Was he mute a while, or all tears?
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Did he raise his hands to his ears so he could scream, scream, scream?
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Did he eat only with his fists?
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Did he eat as if something inside of him would never be fed?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Did he arch his back and hammer his heels into the floor
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: the minute there was something he sought?
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: And did you feel yourself caught there,
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: wanting to let go,
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: to run, to be called back to wherever your two tangled souls had sprung from?
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Did you ever feel as though something were rising up inside you?
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: A fire-white ghost?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Did you feel pity?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: And for whom?
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: This has been The Daily Poem.
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  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.
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  SPEAKER_00: We'll be back tomorrow with another subscriber episode,
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  SPEAKER_00: and then here on the main channel on Wednesday.
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  SPEAKER_00: Till then,
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  SPEAKER_00: find us at dailypoempod.substack.com to listen to past episodes of The Daily Poem,
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: or subscribe and become a supporter of the show.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: For all of us at Goldberry Studios, I'm Sean Johnson wishing you happy reading.