I fell in love with a poet once. Poets are special pieces of work. I had always wanted to write poetry and had, time and time again, when the going got tough. My poetry was never anything special and, oh, I loathed the rhyme. That boyfriend almost broke any poet left in me; laughing at my words and berating me for any attempt I made. I kept writing. What finally broke me of any thought that I could be a poet was the birth and relinquishment of my daughter.
I wrote a lot of poetry while I was pregnant with her; some about the pregnancy itself, some not. After she was born, I found myself almost unable to write sentences and paragraphs in prose form to explain the hows and whats of what I was feeling. I didn’t even know what I was feeling. I haven’t written poetry since. I don’t imagine I will.
When I saw Suz’s entry in the GIMH Carnival for adoption poetry, I pulled up my old, locked archives. (Remember, I’ve been blogging since 2001. It’s all available at the click of a mouse for me.) I read a few of my poems from 2003, the year that the Munchkin grew within me. It was a hard read.
I chose to share this particular poem, one without a title, for a specific reason. I received counseling from my agency and from someone I trusted as an adoptive mother (not Munchkin’s Mom) that I should make any choices about what I was doing regarding the pregnancy separate from the relationship that formed with my now husband. I am still angry with those people for that advice; it was the wrong advice. Placing the Munchkin broke him and I forever hold that guilt. I live with it, daily. I don’t talk about it often because it’s not easy for me to talk about, nor him. I do know that if we hadn’t been friends for years going into the relationship and the loss, we wouldn’t have survived the fallout.
And so I present a poem that I titled “//,” written on August 31, 2003.
She bit her lip. She stared
straight up at the ceiling which
she couldn’t see due to the
pitch black darkness of the
room. She closed her eyes
tighter, tighter, tighter still,
until stars of pink and white
sparkled and shone on the black
canvas. No avail. A tear managed
to seep its way out of the corner
of her left eye, making a lonesome
trail down her cheek. Giving up
the battle, she opened her eyes
to see his head resting on her
ever growing belly; his finger
gently tapping, hoping for response.
She felt a movement from inside
as the baby kicked his face with
a might as fierce as ever. She was
unsure if the giggling that followed
came from his mouth or if she merely
imagined her unborn child laughing
at the game the two had formed.
She felt hideous. She felt she needed
locked away in the deepest, darkest
dungeon for a series of seventeen
lifetime sentences. Anyone with eyes
could see the love he had for
this child; why else would he so
enjoy being kicked square on in the
face? A bond had been formed. And
she was about to break it. So cruel
she felt. She tried to distance herself.
Baseball. Stock market. Pistachios.
She thought of everything. And nothing.
But she knew, deep inside, that moment
would be forever engraved in her mind.