Discuss two Poems about leaving home

To a Daughter Leaving Home  by Linda Pastan

When I taught you

at eight to ride

a bicycle, loping along

beside you

as you wobbled away

on two round wheels,

my own mouth rounding

in surprise when you pulled

ahead down the curved

path of the park,

I kept waiting

for the thud

of your crash as I

sprinted to catch up, while you grew

smaller, more breakable

with distance,

pumping, pumping

for your life, screaming

with laughter,

the hair flapping

behind you like a

handkerchief waving

goodbye.

Pick one line from each poem that shows a parent's perspective on a child leaving for college.

High School Senior           Sharon Olds

            For seventeen years, her breath in the house
            at night, puff, puff, like summer
            cumulus above her bed,
            and her scalp smelling of apricots
            --this being who had formed within me,         5

            squatted like a bright tree-frog in the dark,
            like an eohippus she had come out of history
            slowly, through me, into the daylight,
            I had the daily sight of her,
            like food or air she was there, like a mother.  10

            I say "college," but I feel as if I cannot tell
            the difference between her leaving for college
            and our parting forever--I try to see
            this house without her, without her pure
            depth of feeling, without her creek-brown    15

            hair, her daedal hands with their tapered
            fingers, her pupils dark as the mourning cloak's
            wing, but I can't. Seventeen years
            ago, in this room, she moved inside me,
            I looked at the river, I could not imagine            20

            my life with her. I gazed across the street,
            and saw, in the icy winter sun,
            a column of steam rush up away from the earth.
            There are creatures whose children float away
            at birth, and those who throat-feed their young   25

            for weeks and never see them again. My daughter
            is free and she is in me--no, my love
            of her is in me, moving in my heart,
            changing chambers, like something poured
            from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed.

            Pick a line or an image to discuss. How is this mother viewing college?

“It can be harder to leave your friends than your family—you know you’ll see your family again.”