Poem of the Week | September 08, 2025

“In the Bed Where I Was Conceived” by Todd Davis is our Poem of the Week.

Todd Davis is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry, most recently Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems and Coffin Honey, both published by Michigan State University Press. He edited the nonfiction collection Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball and coedited the anthologies A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia and Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and professor of environmental studies at Pennsylvania State University. His website is todddavispoet.com.

In the Bed Where I Was Conceived

Night gathers at the headboard, tea-colored light
vanishing, sip by sip, into the holler’s mouth.

Dogtooth violet catches the dark along its leaves,
and maple posts corner the bed, pine frame keeping us

for a time. I don’t recognize the sounds high up
in the trees. When we can’t name what approaches,

we assume it’s the going-away face of death.
It’s been years since my mother and father

turned to ash. Tonight my lover holds me
in the bed where I was conceived.

Author’s Note

After my father and mother passed away, I inherited the bed they slept in together for more than fifty years. As a child I would look forward to Sunday mornings when neither of them had to go to work and I could crawl into bed with them, snuggling between their warm bodies. In “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” Galway Kinnell writes about his son Fergus, claiming that the “habit of memory” propels the young boy “to the ground of his making.” I’ve been in love with that phrase for more than four decades, and as my parents aged, I often thought about their lives and the passion they held for each other as the ground of my making. I miss them dearly. I’m also so grateful for my wife Shelly, whom I’ve known since I was twelve years old and to whom I have been married for thirty-seven years. Her tenderness toward me, holding me in the bed where I was conceived, is a gift of grace, a balm for the loneliness and grief the years carry.