Poem: Everything We Don’t Want Them to Know

Everything We Don’t Want Them to Know

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

At eleven, my granddaughter looks like my daughter

did, that slender body, that thin face, the grace

with which she moves. When she visits, she sits

with my daughter; they have hot chocolate together

and talk. The way my granddaughter moves her hands,

the concentration with which she does everything,

knocks me back to the time when I sat with my daughter

at this table and we talked and I watched the grace

with which she moved her hands, the delicate way

she lifted the heavy hair back behind her ear.

My daughter is grown now, married

in a fairy-tale wedding, divorced, something inside

her broken, healing slowly. I look at my granddaughter

and I want to save her, as I was not able

to save my daughter. Nothing is that simple,

all our plans, carefully made, thrown into a cracked

pile by the way love betrays us.

“Everything We Don’t Want Them to Know” by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, from What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009, appeared on The Writer’s Almanac in 2015 and was also possted in January 2026 on the new The Writer's Almanac on Substack.

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow, and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a pairing of her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.