Showing posts with label Free. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Free. Show all posts

13 August 2012

Naming Free


I wish I could say I knew
what was happening in my body.
It is my body. I am a nurse.
Surely that's not too much to ask.
The pain was intermittent, insistent,
signaled something wrong with my pregnancy,
sent me to the hospital. But
I'd never felt it before
so I turned on my stomach to ease 
the pain as I waked off and on
through the night.

I wish I could say I knew
what was happening in my body as I woke that night
to urgently go to the bathroom.
A nurse had put a container covering the toilet.
Why, I wondered.

I wish I could say
I picked up that tiny girl
in the white plastic container,
held her and whispered what I thought: 'I'm sorry 
I failed to carry you long enough for you to live.'

She looked so perfect as I stared at her
but she didn't breathe or move
and all I did was stare, never 
touched her. And for every day thereafter,
I wondered how I didn't do this simple thing-
touch my daughter and
name her.

I wish I could say that I told that secret,
sought help for that remorse
magnifying my grief,
forgave myself, didn't have guilt
that sleeping on my stomach caused the miscarriage,
didn't have nightmares for years 
about forgetting crucial things.

What I can say
is that it took until I was 50, in therapy
over another loss, for all that to come flooding back.
I grabbed the chance to do it again, do it
as I wished I had done it then-
hold that baby in my arms,
greet her, tell her of her family and name her-
name her love, name her wish,
name her Free.


This is posted in response to the prompt of Stuart McPherson at dVerse Poets for Poetics: The Beautiful Sadness. I posted this poem two years ago under a different title but have reworked it for this topic because beautiful sadness perfectly describes what this experience ended up being for me.