Lorna Goodison is widely regarded as one of the most important voices in Caribbean and World literature. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1947, Goodison has earned numerous distinctions, including the title of Poet Laureate of Jamaica (2017). Her poetry is celebrated for its fierce compassion, its grounding in the lived realities of Jamaican and Caribbean women, and its ability to move between the biblical and the streetwise, the lyrical and the political.
“The Woman Speaks to the Man Who Has Employed Her Son” is one of Goodison’s most searing and emotionally complex poems. It appears in A World of Prose, the widely used CXC/CSEC anthology, and is essential reading for Caribbean Literature students at the secondary and tertiary levels.
The poem is a dramatic monologue delivered by a mother to the unnamed man who has lured her son into a life of crime. It is a poem about sacrifice, grief, powerlessness, and prayer; a mother’s reckoning with a world that has stolen her child from her despite everything she did to prepare him for something better.
Key Fact: This poem is frequently examined in CSEC English B and Caribbean Studies. Students should be able to discuss themes, poetic devices, the role of the speaker, and the poem’s social context.
The Poem AT A Glance
| Poet | Lorna Goodison |
| Nationality | Jamaican |
| Published In | A World of Prose (Heinemann/Pearson, 2005) – ed. Mark McWatt & Hazel Simmons-McDonald |
| Form | Free verse dramatic monologue |
| Speaker | A mother addressing the man who employed her son in criminal activity |
| Themes | Motherhood, sacrifice, poverty, powerlessness, faith, violence, social corruption |
| Tone | Mournful, accusatory, resigned, prayerful, defiant |
| Key Devices | Allusion, imagery, symbolism, irony, enjambment, repetition |
| CSEC Relevance | English B Paper 2; Caribbean Literature; Social Issues |
Summary of the poem “The Woman Speaks to the Man Who Has Employed Her Son” by Lorna Goodison
The poem unfolds as a direct address – a mother speaking to the man who has given her son a gun and drawn him into a criminal life. It begins with the physical experience of pregnancy: the unease, the metallic taste, the fullness of carrying a child. This establishes the poem as rooted in maternal experience.
We learn that the mother raised her son alone, twice, she says, once as mother and once as father. She had no support from the man who fathered the child, who treated all his children with “equal and unbiased indifference.” She set no ceiling on what her son could become: a doctor, an earth healer, a pilot. She carried hope for him the way the poor carry hope desperately, strategically, because it is the only currency they have.
However, this unnamed employer has given her son “one whole submachine gun / for him alone.” The mother’s response is not rage in the conventional sense – it is a spiritual, resigned, and prophetic grief. She has gone downtown and bought black cloth and a mourning hat, preparing for the death she knows is coming. She cannot stop it because she has no power over “you” – the employer at the level of the earth.
What she has are prayers. She prays for her son. She prays against the man. She weeps. At the poem’s close, she aligns herself with the mothers of Judas Iscariot and the thief crucified beside Jesus – women whose sons did terrible things, whose love did not stop tragedy. The poem ends with the shattering word “Absalom”; the name of King David’s son who rebelled and died, whose death broke David’s heart entirely.
In short: This is a poem about what happens to a mother’s love when the world is designed to destroy her child. It is about the limits of maternal power, the depth of maternal faith, and the unbearable weight of foreknowledge.
Themes
1. Motherhood and Sacrifice
The poem is first and foremost a meditation on the price of being a mother, especially a poor, single mother in the Caribbean. The speaker has sacrificed everything: she carried her son full term, raised him alone as both mother and father, set no limits on his potential, carried hope for him “like the poor / carry hope.” Yet all of that sacrifice is undone by the man with the gun. Goodison refuses to sentimentalize this: the mother’s love is fierce, real, and ultimately inadequate against structural violence.
2. Poverty and Social Inequality
The poem is deeply embedded in the economic realities of Jamaica and the wider Caribbean. Poverty shapes every dimension of the mother’s experience: the absent father, the impossibility of formal paths to success, the ease with which criminal employers recruit young men. The employer’s “gift” of a submachine gun is portrayed as a grotesque parody of employment: this is what the economy offers when it offers nothing legitimate.
3. Powerlessness and Resignation
“She has no power over you and this / at the level of earth.” This is perhaps the most devastating line in the poem. The mother acknowledges, with sobering, that she cannot stop what is happening. Her power exists only in the spiritual realm, in prayer and tears and the solidarity of grieving mothers across history and scripture.
4. Faith, Prayer, and Spiritual Resistance
What the mother cannot do physically, she does spiritually. She reads psalms, she weeps, she prays. The poem is saturated with biblical language and imagery. This is not passive piety; it is active spiritual warfare, the only arsenal available to her. Her “eyewater” (tears) are her weapons. Her prayers are actions.
5. Violence and Its Effects on Families
The poem makes visible what crime statistics obscure: behind every young man pulled into violence is a mother who carried him, raised him, and prayed for him. The submachine gun is not an abstraction; it is the instrument of her son’s destruction, given by a man who calls himself a father figure while handing out weapons instead of bread.
Betrayal and False Fatherhood
“He says you are like a father to him.” This is the poem’s central irony and its central wound. A real father gives bread. This man gives hot and exploding death. The poem asks: what kind of father is this? The question resonates throughout Caribbean societies where absent fathers, exploitative employers, and inadequate male role models contribute to cycles of violence.
The full analysis continues below – including line-by-line breakdown, literary devices, essay structure, and practice questions.
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