Don’t poets know it, Better than others? God can’t be always everywhere: and, so, Invented Mothers.

The lines propose a poetic, paradoxical theology of motherhood: because the divine cannot be physically present in every moment of human need, “mothers” are imagined as God’s practical answer—embodied care, vigilance, and mercy made local and immediate. The speaker’s rhetorical question (“Don’t poets know it…?”) suggests that poets, attuned to emotional truth, recognize this substitution more keenly than others. The sentiment elevates maternal love from private affection to a quasi-sacred vocation, implying that the everyday acts of protection and nurture are the closest many people come to experiencing providence. It also hints at human dependence: our earliest experience of safety and grace is mediated through a mother’s presence.