A mother in a whole different vein is the Biblical character in "The Prodigal Mother Suspects." "No one, not even Jesus, will mention her," but Wright posits her existence and her personality with confidence, her very lack of an over role in the famous parable making her role if not predictable, at least tenable. She knows her other son will not be pleased by her husband's show for the returning ingrate but she cannot object to the party, can only stand ready to trim "a few lamps. She waits / for the end of this parable (or another) to arrive." Wright's poems are in consistent sympathy with those who need someone who will try to understand them. He cannot fully enjoy his time with his wife on a "Sunday Afternoon in the Universe," without contemplating his wife's grandmother, who, at ninety years, finds her "bones are turning to dust," cannot enjoy the simple pleasures of his domestic life in "A Selfish Sonnet of Thanksgiving," without feeling for those with lives more disrupted, less serene. Like all four poets here examined, David Wright's poetry does not try to separate itself from us through a celebration of its own splendors, but rather creates a kind of splendor by refusing to separate itself from us, no matter how tempting that separation sometimes must be.