September Poem
Now can I say?
On that blackest day,
When I learned of
The uncountable, the hellbent obscenity,
I felt, with shame, a seed in me,
Powerful and inarticulate:
I wanted to be pregnant.
Women in the street flowing toward
Home, dazed with grief, and my daze
Admixed with jealous awe, I wondered
If they were,
Or wished for it, too,
To be full, to be forming,
To be giving our blood’s food
To the yet to be.
To feel the warp of morning’s
Hormonal chucking, the stutter kiss
Of first movement. At first,
The idea of sex a further horror:
To take pleasure in a collision
Of bodies was vile, self-centered, too lush.
But the pushy, ennobling pulse
Of the ordinary won’t halt
For good taste. Or knows nothing of tragedy.
Thus. Today I have a boy
A week old. Blessed surplus:
A third child.
Have you heard mothers,
Matter of fact, call the third
The insurance policy?
That wasn’t why.
And not because when so many people
Die we want, crudely pining,
To replace them with more people.
But for the wild, heaven-grazing
Pleasure and pain of the arrival.
The small head crushed and melony
After a journey
Out. Sheer cliff
Of the first day, flat in bed, gut-empty,
Ringed by memories and sharp cries.
Sharp bliss in proximity to the roundness,
The globe already a-spin, particular,
Of a whole new life.
Which might in any case
End in towering sorrow.
-Deborah Garrison
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