This poem was written many years ago to a woman in Nepal,
where anti-abortion laws were so strict that they also included
miscarriages and stillbirths, punishable by imprisonment. Since
then Nepal has reversed course. What is so ironic is that in
many states, American women are currently confronting those
same anti-abortion laws, never before having to do so.
It’s written
from the private quarters
of the stillborn before the vial
of clear liquid can be taken into the body,
before the mind can ease down
into the warm fathoms of oblivion.
In this ward, nurses carry away
the womb’s tenants, hushed in soft, white linen
like small pillows, like babies’-breath
swaddled in the extreme unction of its sweet clusters,
the children who could not survive outside
the body and so at ease in their eternity
that nothing could have saved them.
In our dreams we learn
not to enter the room, locked as we are
in the crib of our bodies, fragile with cessation;
your own body flattened by deficiency,
nailed shut like the bodies of women elsewhere,
pulled under the sheets of Intensive Care.
Every night in these hills, I think of you
in your cell. Our voices are silent
as a whip unfurls across your breast.
But, nonetheless, there is a language: the body
dredged of its poisons under a white light,
like the moon struggling to escape the forceps
of haze, the sharp peak of the mountain
sliding far below, but still above us,
still visible, the air compressed
out of the lungs. The child, laid flat
in the surgeon’s hand, is not spared by our resistance
to empty the womb, nor the urn we shall carry
into the tomb with so many other women
who are quietly disappearing into their shadows.
WILDsound Writing Festival 