For Our Mothers Felicia Olusanya

Felicia Olusanya · Leaving Cert Poetry

A daughter speaks to her mother about a private loss, then widens out to every mother who has learned to carry grief quietly and call it getting on with life.

For Our Mothers: Context

The poem opens with the word Nne, an Igbo word of address that the poem itself glosses as meaning something close to my dear. It places the poem inside a specific, Nigerian family idiom from the first line, and the word returns later, spoken back to the daughter by her mother, so the same word does different emotional work depending on who is using it. The poem is a free-verse, spoken-word piece in thirteen stanzas of very different lengths, some just a couplet, some a single line, some a longer verse paragraph. There is no fixed rhyme or metre. Instead the poem leans on direct address, quoted dialogue, and repetition, which is typical of performance poetry written to be read aloud rather than only read silently on a page. Reading it aloud once before you analyse it is genuinely useful here: the shifts in stanza length are easier to hear than to see, and the poem’s pacing does real emotional work, slowing right down at the moments of greatest pain.

Key Moments

The poem opens mid-complaint, dropping the reader straight into exhaustion rather than easing in with explanation.

“Nne, I can’t do this any longer.”For Our Mothers

The emotional centre of the poem is a miscarriage, handled in short, almost clinical sentences that resist easy comfort.

“5 weeks old. / The baby hadn’t fully formed yet.”For Our Mothers

The poem then widens. What began as one woman’s private grief becomes a shared inheritance, passed between women who dance in public and grieve in private.

“Our mothers are dancing on Thanksgiving Sunday with bitter stories in their mouths,”For Our Mothers

Key Themes

The central theme is concealment: pain is managed through appearance rather than resolved, powder and lipstick covering “tired dark eyes” the way cheap compliments cover silence. A second theme is grief and loss, handled through the miscarriage and its aftermath. A third is intergenerational pressure, the way mothers pass warnings and expectations on to daughters without ever naming what they themselves went through, so the daughter inherits the caution without ever being told the story behind it. A fourth theme is religious ritual as a form of endurance: the weekly car ride to church, repeated almost identically each time, becomes less about faith and more about a routine the women use to hold themselves together. Keep these connected rather than listing them separately: the poem argues that silence itself, not just sadness, is what actually gets inherited between generations of women.

Literary Devices

The poem’s clearest device is anaphora, repeated openings such as “Sighing because” that build a steady, mourning rhythm without needing a formal stanza pattern to do it. Quoted dialogue is used throughout, dropping in the platitudes mothers actually say, which lets the poem criticise those platitudes without editorialising over them. The recurring refrain quoted below closes the poem twice, the second time bluntly naming what the mother never had rather than promising the daughter will succeed where she did not. Olusanya also moves the poem’s point of view outward partway through, from a single first-person speaker addressing her own mother, to a collective address to every mother, which is one of the clearest structural choices in the poem and worth naming directly in an answer on technique.

“For mama’s sake, / Find the love she never did.”For Our Mothers

Mood

The mood opens urgent and confessional, then moves through a quiet, bitter irony in the quoted compliments and platitudes. It deepens into unflinching grief at the miscarriage, widens into a communal sadness once the poem shifts to address every mother, and closes on something tender but unresolved: hope named, not promised.

Conclusion

This poem moves from one daughter’s private exhaustion to a whole generation of mothers taught to perform composure instead of expressing pain. What starts as a single conversation with one parent becomes, by the poem’s final stanza, an argument about how women in general are taught to carry loss. It never resolves that pressure or promises the next generation will escape it, which is part of what makes it feel honest rather than comforting. For Ordinary Level, hold onto that movement from one speaker to a whole generation, anchor it with the miscarriage stanza and the closing refrain, and you have an answer with real structure and genuine feeling behind it.

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